Larky Society

THE BEAUTIFUL LIFE by Edwin Gilbert. 320 pages. Putnam. $5.95.

Rosemary Grovenour, a fairly ordinary Connecticut housewife, has good looks going for her, good schools and good family behind her. She also has good strong neurotic twitches--all her dabs at painting, writing, ceramics and interior decoration have added up to a muddy mess. And Rosemary feels that she, too, has added up to nothing. Honestly, it is enough to make her dose herself with self-pity pills.

Instead, Rosemary persuades her husband Grove to buy a cooperative apartment on Manhattan's Fifth Avenue. Soon, she is wiggling onto the right committees, becoming an intimate of the Cancer Benefit crowd, the Liver and Kidney people, the Rheumatic Fever bunch. Eventually, everybody hails her as the swingingest, dingdongest member of the jet set along with Bobbsie-Ann Boggsen and Minni Ogden Foote.

Blending pop satire with the incisive reporting that he used to dissect rich automotive families in American Chrome, and international business wheeler-dealers in The New Ambassadors, Edwin Gilbert has made a best-seller out of what may well be the larkiest study of Manhattan pseudo society since the 400 were marked down to $3.98.

Readers may mull over some thinly disguised New York types to see whether they can identify Gilbert's models. There is, for example, a successful artist named Waldo Stryker who is famous for his painting of soup cans, and there is a millionaire culture addict named Hank Hartley. Whether Rosemary herself stands for some real-life jet setter hardly matters. After all, who can fail to adore "Rosiepooh" when she turns out at a party with a miniskirt fringed with Campbell soup tins, and coffee cans capped over her breasts?

Gilbert never spoils the fun by moralizing. But just as surely as the bottom falls out of the pop art market, Rosemary finds that Grove has taken up with a girl who wears Woolworth pearls and doesn't sit on committees. The whole affair is something Grove might characterize with his favorite expression, "bacillus bullfosis."

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