Three-Decker

By John Skow

CLARA REEVE

by LEONIE MARGRAVE 442 pages. Knopf. $8.95.

This season's most agreeable literary game is the counterfeiting of Victorian novels. From Brian Moore (The Great Victorian Collection) to Michael Crichton (The Great Train Robbery), no artificer plays the game more entertainingly than the writer who calls herself Leonie Hargrave. The pseudonym, notes the publisher coyly, "may be said to be the Maiden Name of an author both prolific and much praised for work in other modes."

Other modes, indeed: card sharping? bunco artistry? Hargrave's mischievous novel Clara Reeve purports to be the memoir of a young Englishwoman from 1850, when she was six, through the years of a preposterous marriage in her early 20s. Many novels attempt to be what they are not--the log of a whaling voyage, the writhings of a student who murders an old pawnbroker--and thus all are stratagems of a kind. But Hargrave's, Moore's and Crichton's constructs are far more elaborate, since they soberly imitate the genteel literary conventions and taboos of a century ago.

Bared Portions. Something other than nostalgia peddling is going on; these are good and compelling writers. But what, exactly, is their game? Why accept the strictures of Victorianism in an epoch of total license? One answer is social criticism posing as irony: actualities mutely placed against canting ideals. A second, equally valid explanation is that any writer who hopes to compose a novel of manners has to go where the manners are--or were.

So here is Clara Reeve, a sober send-up of the Victorian three-decker, as ingenious as an embezzlement scheme --and incidentally an astringent comment on the predicament of being female. As a little girl, Clara is orphaned, and raised in the forbidding London home of a pious uncle. When she is so light-minded as to laugh aloud at the antics of a bird in the garden, he whips her neck with a watch chain. The child accurately notes that it was indeed the custom to birch girls on the bared portions of their anatomies, but adds that nevertheless it was "inexpressibly painful."

The selfsame uncle seizes his wife and shakes her furiously when, while promenading, she gazes about her at a glorious sunset. Clara finds this reaction extreme but correct: "Most authorities do maintain that a lady ought not to divert her gaze from the direction in which she is walking." Still, her uncle need not have raged; "a word--at most a frown --would have sufficed."

Clara's lot improves miraculously, as can happen in Victoriana, when she inherits the fortune of her great-uncle Douglas, the fifth Baron Rhodes. In short order she marries her titled cousin Niles and thus becomes a countess. Whether the marriage is an improvement--whether, in fact, it is a marriage --is a question that remains open till the melodrama's final scenes. Niles is charming and affectionate but in an oddly distant mode. Months after the wedding, Clara remains utterly ignorant of the process by which her species reproduces itself. It is clear that Niles is unduly influenced by his improbable mother and by a coarse, swaggering manservant.

Not much more can be said, lest the author's outrageous unlikelihoods become unglued. The dust jacket offers useful clues: a volcano erupting; a young woman, evidently Clara, holding a pistol and a rose; a young man, evidently Niles, holding a false face; and a rather sinister older woman. Readers who follow these tantalizations to the end will be richly rewarded--with everything save the real name of the author.

. John Skow

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