Cold Comforts

By R.Z. Sheppard

EVIDENCE OF LOVE by SHIRLEY ANN GRAU 240 pages. Knopf. $7.95.

Shirley Ann Grau is now 47 years, five novels and two short-story collections old. She is, by any reasonable standard, a successful writer. Critics generally admire her work. The Keepers of the House won a Pulitzer Prize in 1965. Her sales chart is not dramatically craggy, but rises to a respectable plateau of long-term gains. Moreover, Grau has managed her career while raising four children as the wife of a philosophy professor in suburban New Orleans.

Such roots and obligations appear to have given the author a sensible attitude toward her work. She has avoided the dangers of early acclaim that might have thrust her into the footsteps of such belles of Southern lettres as Flannery O'Conner and Eudora Welty. Instead, Grau has usually played to her strength -- a cautious application of talent to the Southern traditions and people she knows best.

Evidence of Love finds her on un familiar ground. The novel's settings include Philadelphia in the 1880s, Europe before and after World War I, British East Africa, contemporary small-town Pennsylvania, Chicago and a modern retirement community on Florida's Gulf Coast. But the three main characters seem to have less interest in place than in themselves.

Edward Milton Henley, born 1883, is a cynically amusing and immensely rich businessman. He is guiltlessly dedicated to his pleasures, which include ex otic women and an occasional boy. He has had four wives but contracted with a bright, healthy Irish immigrant girl to bear his child. The result is Stephen Henley, raised in an expensive, loveless manner. Instead of following Edward's sybaritic path, Stephen becomes a Unitarian minister and a classics scholar. He marries Lucy Roundtree Evans, a widow who has spent her sexual pas sion on her first husband.

The novel is neatly divided into sections in which Edward, Stephen and Lucy explore feelings and relationships.

The monologues allow a cross-indexing of various aspects of love: lust, friend ship, disinterested affection, good will and gratitude. Edward Henley's antiseptic Don Juanism is a calculated mockery of the mythical passions of a faithful Tristan. Stephen Henley, too, has anesthetized his emotions, by marrying a companion and choosing a church that prizes rationality more than faith.

Flimsy Sets. Lucy bridges some of the differences between father and son.

She is that familiar character of modern fiction, the wanderer who can in habit diverse places and situations as naturally as a hermit crab crawls into an abandoned shell. Unlike Edward, she accepts age and solitude without feeling boredom. Unlike Stephen, she can draw pleasure from watching dust motes dance in a shaft of light.

Grau's excellence of craft disguises the book's principal defect: Evidence of Love is not truly a novel but a linking of short stories. The author's chief concern is to render her characters' responses to intense moments of their lives -- one of the working definitions of the short story of the '40s and '50s. Her far-flung locations are not textured settings but flimsy sets where the author vainly at tempts to stage her quiet drama of rootlessness and disaffection.

The relationship of hedonism to asceticism -- as illustrated by father and son -- is a rich and complex subject. Grau only stays on its surface. Choosing to work with cool Yankees, the Southern observer seems to have developed a case of cold feet.

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