Son of P.P. Rides Again

THE TIGHT WHITE COLLAR (288 pp.)--Grace Metalious -- Julian Messner ($3.95).

Novelist Metalious' latest effort, again designed to prove that New England is a place where people can get into trouble with their skis off, bears the same relation to her first two books that a B-girl does to a prostitute: its implied promise is sex in return for money, but what it delivers is merely a phony hotel room key and a whiff of perfume. A certain amount of houghmagandy does occur ("His touch on her body was the lightest she could ever imagine and it awakened every single nerve . . ."), but it is pallid stuff compared with the rape, incest, flagellation and other veneries of Peyton Place and Return to Peyton Place. If Author Metalious continues such deception, her readers will all go back to Jack Woodford, the U.S.'s leading plain-wrapper author (Dangerous Love, Illicit).

Students of her art will remember that Novelist Metalious interleaved the gummier passages of her first book with hearty descriptive exercises celebrating the passage of the seasons among the granite hills, and that in the second book all this rhetoric was removed. The excision not only left the characters squirming about with an embarrassing lack of privacy, like residents of a motel whose walls had suddenly been plucked away, but it robbed the reader of the harmless delusion that the author was attempting literature. The present work reinstates a page or two of classy nature-walk prose, but cuts out almost all narrative.

What remains is a scrawny tale about a young schoolteacher who tries to get hired in a nasty town called Cooper's Landing, but succeeds only in being cuckolded. Every so often the author introduces another character and halts all action for a couple of chapters while she tells how he achieved his present wretchedness. The measure of how feeble are the author's efforts is that the major shockers concern a servant girl who becomes pregnant, a woman who bears a Mongolian idiot, and a young man who will not admit that he is a homosexual. Novelist Metalious shows herself to be a woman of taste in telling this last episode; her custom is to describe heterosexual claspings in considerable detail, but after the smoldering line, "Come here, David," the young invert's carrying-on is swathed in silence.

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