Fate Worse Than Life

SOMETHING IN DISGUISE by Elizabeth Jane Howard. 280 pages. Viking. $5.95.

May spends her time meditating on the Absolute and dragging electric heaters around her enormous house in a futile effort to keep warm. Her husband, a retired army colonel and career bore, schemes to prevent unknown forces from tricking him out of May's money. Alice, the colonel's daughter by an earlier marriage, wants to escape the house, where she serves her father's whim and writes morose poetry on the side. Oliver, May's son, is destined for a brilliant career, if only he could get down to choosing one.

This unlikely group of characters endures at the center of a slight but very funny novel about the search for a happy life. Dissatisfied in various ways, they all look not for great wealth or passion or power, but merely for a little comfort. They are trying to make circumstance leave them in peace.

Like Jane Austen, Elizabeth Jane Howard (Mrs. Kingsley Amis) constructs her novel by pairing off her people with a series of outsiders and observing the consequences--in this case, a miscarriage, a Riviera love affair and a slow poisoning. Like Evelyn Waugh, the author believes that fate has the blind staggers. She takes peculiar delight in showing that there is no justice in the distribution of misery and joy, no allowance made for innocence or effort. Alice, for example, succeeds in escaping her father's house--but ends up unhappily married in a "luxury bungalow with Spanish-style touches."

Miss Howard's creations are not as sharply drawn as Jane Austen's, partly because their problems rise out of peculiarly modern conditions--social fluidity, moral uncertainty, the increased freedom of personal choice. Where there is no norm against which behavior or motives can be measured, the novel of manners degenerates into an attack on the world at large--as in "black humor"--or into a series of satirical character sketches. Something in Disguise leans toward the latter.

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