She Who Gets Slapped

A SEASON OF MISTS (243 pp.)--Honor Tracy--Random House ($3.95).

Charlie Chaplin once explained: "When I walk right up and slap a grand lady because she gave me a contemptuous look, it is really right. -They won't admit it, but it's right, and that is why they laugh. I make them conscious of the reality of life. 'You think this is it, don't you?' I say. 'Well, it isn't, but this is--see?' And then they laugh."

Novelist Honor Tracy understands Chaplin's kind of reality, as she has amply demonstrated in two previous acid-witty novels. The Straight and Narrow Path and The Prospects Are Pleasing. The grand lady in both of them was Ireland--surprisingly so because the author is herself part Irish. In A Season of Mists, She Who Gets Slapped is a more traditional Irish target--the English landed gentry.

Ninian La Touche is a rich, middle-aged bachelor and art fancier who lives at Silverwood, a vast sprawling estate outside London. Ninian has vague intimations of what goes on in the wicked

Great World--and what he knows of it long ago convinced him that he could not feel "at home in the 20th century." At Silverwood, time has been stopped resolutely, circa 1870. What starts the clocks moving again and causes Ninian's downfall is a hopelessly immature, nearly illiterate 18-year-old whom he hires as his secretary. Unlike Lolita's Humbert Humbert, Ninian manages to convince himself that he is interested in the girl's mind: peering at a "modern" daub through myopic eyes, she had once by wildest mischance correctly identified a Dufy. In his passion for the girl, Ninian abandons his London art gallery, gets himself thrown into prison and eventually flees with his beloved to Spain.

He leaves behind a collection of egocentrics as outrageous as any in modern fiction, ranging from a scrofulous teen-aged novelist named Leo Piper to Billy Box, a softhearted symphony conductor who spends much of his time kidnaping animals from research laboratories. In the end, Ninian returns to Silverwood, but the clocks have advanced too far, and he can no longer peer out at the world with the old "monastic calm." Nor, for that matter, can the reader.

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