The Nascent Id

MELINDA by Gaia Servadio. 375 pages. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $6.95.

This novel seems to have been sprayed out of a can. As with most of the new and convenient instant satires, Melinda is compounded of 2% active ingredient and 98% harmless propellant. Even so, it should not be inhaled over a prolonged period.

Author Gaia Servadio is the beautiful Italian-born wife of William Mostyn-Owen, an art expert at Christie's, the London auction house. She has modeled, acted in experimental films, exhibited her paintings in Milan and Rome, and covered last year's Arab-Israeli war for the Daily Telegraph.

In her first novel, she operates good-naturedly in the postanalysis, guilt-free era. God is not only dead, there never was a birth announcement. The book is a catchy packaging job of the familiar semi-exaggerations about how the super-rich and super-famous flit mindlessly from pleasure to pleasure in ever-tightening circles that lead to self-destruction. With pagan innocence, Melinda herself commits incest, adultery, child neglect, international outrage and multiple murder. Because she is not a character, but the author's representation of nascent id, Melinda cannot suffer hell and damnation. She must be ticketed to limbo on a Russian moon rocket that gets irretrievably rutted in orbit around the earth. There she joins the other pieces of spent, sophisticated junk beeping and squealing their Muzak of the spheres.

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