Butter on the Bow

By R.Z. Sheppard

GIRL, 20

by KINGSLEY AMIS

253 pages. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. $5.95.

Sir Roy Vandervane, 54, violinist, composer and conductor, is a familiar Amis character, a clowning nihilist with a middle finger ever at the ready. "Rage at absent, or largely imaginary foes," writes Amis, "was part of his life style."

Offsetting the energetic Vandervane in this novel is his friend Douglas Yandell, the 34-year-old narrator. Yandell, a competent, dull music critic, hangs on to his job at a London paper "if only to keep out the sort of little mountebank likely to do a turn at it between a spell on the books page and the real prize spot, the restaurant column."

Yandell and Vandervane are two professionals, although the maestro's greatest skill is in provoking disapproval while thoroughly enjoying himself. His latest enthusiasms combine an old appetite for philandering with a sweet tooth for the styles of the young. Long hair, mod clothes, of course. But there is also his composition Elevations 9, a chamber concerto for violin, sitar, bass guitar and bongos, and his affair with an ob noxiously ill-tempered girl named Sylvia. Despite the novel's rather straight forward title, she turns out to be only 17.

Sir Roy has no illusions about what he is up to: "Sex plus whiff of illegality . . . dirty ole man luring child into disused plate-layer's hut and plying her with wine-gums and dandelion-and-burdock to induce her to remove knickers and slake his vile lusts." Wife Kitty always knows when Sir Roy is off and rutting because each new affair is signaled by his stockpiling new undershorts.

The plot is fairly complex and farcical, and Yandell does a neat job of keeping the small confusions and flimsy coincidences straight. Both Vandervanes use him: Kitty to try and persuade her husband to leave Sylvia, Sir Roy to further the escapade. Uppermost (but never very elevated) in Yandel's mind is preserving his friend's musical reputation by preventing a performance of Elevations 9. Spreading butter on Sir Roy's bow only postpones the debacle a few minutes. Happily Yandell has small expectations.

So should the reader of this book. Only Amis' talent as a storyteller and stylist keeps Girl, 20 from settling into the pettiest smugness. But then, an Amis novel has always been like a naughty jaunt on a thinly iced pond. Too much moral or critical weight concentrated in any one place means breaking through to the shallows beneath the surface.

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