Money Is Truffles

By Martha Duffy

THE HOUSE OF ALL NATIONS

by CHRISTINA STEAD 787 pages. Holt, Rinehart& Winston. $10.

This is a long, unfathomably static but often exhilarating novel about money. There are 104 chapters, at least as many characters, and dialogue that runs on and on like ticker tape. Money is not a particularly easy subject for fiction. Miss Stead is no Balzac or Dickens; on the other hand, she is no Louis Auchincloss either. She is, however, obviously mesmerized by money and her sharpest writing is comment about it. "Certainly I understand the class war," says a rich old countess. "We steal from the pigs: the pigs know they want truffles and we want truffles when we see the pigs with them. Money is truffles."

The house of the title is the Banque Mercure, a private bank for rich speculators flourishing in Paris during the grim days of 1931. (By no coincidence there was a famous whorehouse of the same name.) To the financial world it is known simply as Bertillon because its presiding and all-powerful genius is sexy, elegant Jules Bertillon. Jules buys when the rest of the world is selling and he and his clients get rich as Europe sinks.

Around him swirl a vast collection of characters: the eccentric genius in grain futures, the Texas oil man (named Tanker!), blackmailers, thieves, underground Communists, wives, children --and mistresses, mistresses, mistresses. There is no plot, only the fitfully told story of Jules' inevitable catastrophe. Mostly to affront the pretensions of a speculator he despises, Jules bets on the pound shortly before it collapses. Though there is still time to hedge, Bertillon of Bertillon goes down with his pride.

An Australian who lives in London, Christina Stead is known in the U.S. chiefly for another doorstop novel called The Man Who Loved Children. Both books were originally published shortly before World War II and forgotten for 30 years. They are more alike than may at first appear. The Man Who Loved Children is an obsessive, virulent chronicle of domestic agony--the kind of endless, patiently malevolent novel Eugene O'Neill might have written.

In the House of All Nations, the approach is similarly expansive but the intensity is missing. To write it the author drew on the years when she and her husband were employed in a bank that collapsed. She observed the motley incarnations of greed who inhabited the place, and obviously developed a grudging fascination with the charms of avarice. But she has set it all in motion with more gusto than discrimination.

.Martha Duffy

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