A Lost Lady

A FAIRLY GOOD TIME by Mavis Gallant. 308 pages. Random House. $5.95.

Goodside's goodside's gander Witha watha wares How sad to punch a poor old man! And throw him down the stare's!

This surreal version of a nursery rhyme is from the pen of Genevieve Deschranes, an imbecile French housewife with an abnormally small vagina. Regularly, Genevieve sends twenty-page love letters--disguised as chapters of a novel --to Philippe Perrigny, a second-rate French journalist who believes that lurking somewhere in the depths of perfidious Albion's Mother Goose is a symbolic answer to the riddle of the universe. Philippe in turn is married, as unsatisfactorily as possible, to Shirley Norrington Higgins Perrigny, an odd Canadian girl, and the heroine of this peculiar yet delightful novel.

Shirley is kin to a long literary line of unworldly New World girls, starting with Daisy Miller, who have pitted their innocence against Old World ambiguities of Europe and pluckily gone under. In her own words, Shirley is "warm, generous, brave even." She is also sloppy, tactless, catty, softhearted, scatterbrained, a compulsive quoter out of context and snooper in her husband's desk drawers, gigantically absentminded, passably promiscuous, desperately lonely, guilt-ridden, polyglot, and sympathetically drawn to other people's troubles. She does the wrong thing every chance she gets, and St. Joseph (her code word for fate) never fails to give her another chance. Yet, unlike Daisy, she does not go under.

Bourgeois Vices. As the book opens, St. Joseph has chosen first to strand Shirley in Europe, a young widow with a small income and no skills, then to marry her into a family of French bourgeois vices. Philippe, Philippe's mother, Philippe's sister are all picayune, prosy, avaricious, suspicious, xenophobic, obsessed with pinching their pennies and palping their livers. They are only part of a larger Paris, drawn with fearful and totally remorseless accuracy, which becomes a tawdry circle of hell. The French whom Shirley meets are all impossibly rude: "We wanted to give you beans and jam for dinner, but my wife refuses to do American cooking," says Philippe's best friend, welcoming Shirley to his house for the first time. They file everything away in loony little mechanical categories they call logic. They are incapable of generosity or any human warmth. They believe that if they take baths every day their skin will come off in long strips.

Shirley, quite the other way, has a compulsion to give everything, including herself, away. When one of the bores and deadbeats she has befriended lets her down, she picks up another. When her nasty little painter friend Renata chooses to try a fake suicide the day after a real abortion, Shirley ditches her husband on a sacred Saturday evening he had reserved for taking her out to dinner and spends the night at Renata's flat. Philippe, ever logical, goes home to mother and has a liver attack. Shirley, forlorn and illogical, goes to a restaurant and picks up another waif, a girl who has ordered a four-course meal for her cocker spaniel but has no money to pay for it.

Minor malevolent figures buzz around. Nobody has Shirley's interests at heart; nobody will hear her cry: "I wanted to be loved more!" The girl skitters on the edge of madness, leaping from drab reality to poetic fancy to sheer incoherence, from self-analysis to baths of self-pity. In the process, Miss Gallant's book bounces from high comedy to low, from pure pathos to arch New Yorkerish chatter. But neither heroine nor style ever loses the sharp wit that provides both with rare bite and rarer balance.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.