Cherchez la Femme

By R.Z. Sheppard

DOUBLE HONEYMOON by EVANS. CONNELL

252 pages. Putnam. $7.95.

Readers of Evan Connell's The Connoisseur already know Karl Muhlbach, the middle-aged insurance executive and widower who developed a quiet obsession with pre-Columbian art. An innately cool eye for authenticity got him started. Muhlbach's sudden desire to possess statuary caused him embarrassment. In Double Honeymoon, Muhlbach again decides to take a risk within limits. This time it is a brief fling with a beautiful young girl every bit as exotic and cracked as a piece of pre-Columbian pottery.

She has an unlikely name, Lambeth Brent, and she treats Muhlbach as if he were a middle-aged door mat. Though he makes a fool of himself over her, he never loses his discretion or his cool collector's eye. Here is Muhlbach on entering Lambeth's apartment for the first time: "On the walls a cheap Miro print, a Tantra poster, a blowup of Humphrey Bogart, half a dozen tissue paper collages." On her shelves, "a picture book about Marilyn Monroe. Scientology. I Ching. M.C. Escher prints. One of Heyerdahl's raft trips. A bestseller by a formidable lady with three names."

What is a cultivated, conservative man from Metropolitan Mutual doing in a place like that? The fact is that Lambeth is delicious and Muhlbach is bored. He would not put it quite that way but Senor Rafael Lopez y Fuentes, a Honduran diplomat does. Lopez is a captivatingly unctuous minor character whom Lambeth has lightly discarded. He does more than take pleasure in trying to warn Muhlbach about the hazards of playing with wildfire; he takes him to see Double Honeymoon, a porn movie in which the girl has a rather animated part. Only her death (she either jumped or fell from her window while drunk) breaks the spell and conveniently ends the book.

But not before Novelist Connell has had a chance to display his characteristic talent for getting a maximum of feeling and perception from a minimum of words. At a time when books about women as victims appear with numbing regularity, Double Honeymoon seems a skillful unpretentious throwback to the tradition of woman as seducer -- a kind of Blue Angel with button-down wings.

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