Deliberate Speed, Stunning Effect the Finishing School by Gail Godwin; Viking; 322 pages; $16.95

By Paul Gray

With A Mother and Two Daughters (1982), her fifth novel, Gail Godwin joined that select circle of critically praised authors who have also produced bestsellers. This happy event entitled her longtime admirers to mixed emotions. While it is pleasurable to see a favored writer receive the success she deserves, it is irksome to realize that membership in a small club of discriminating readers has suddenly been thrown open to multitudes. If so many people, the reasoning follows, liked Godwin's loose, loving chronicle of three plucky females, then maybe we should find it disappointing. And whom will she write for next time, all of them or us?

The Finishing School should thoroughly satisfy both of Godwin's constituencies. It is at once her most artful and accomplished novel and an old-fashioned, irresistible page turner. The plot, like that of A Mother and Two Daughters, is set in motion by the death of a father and the adjustments demanded of the women he protected. But this time Godwin has made things harder on the survivors, particularly a young daughter who must endure a brief but harrowing rite of passage toward maturity.

Justin Stokes, 40, a successful stage actress, looks back on the summer she turned 14 and staked her claim on a future. In the beginning, the teen-age girl feels doomed by fate, with fair reason. Within the past two years, her mother's patrician parents, who helped raise her in a grand Virginia house, have both died. Then her father is killed in a car accident. Justin's mother must transplant her and her younger brother to a village in upstate New York, to the tidy, stultifying suburban home of Aunt Mona, the late husband's sister. Stunned by her losses and longing for the old days "before everybody started dying," Justin mopes and takes solitary bike rides through this alien Yankee territory. On one such foray, she discovers a tumbledown hut by the side of a pond and decides to investigate. When she sees a woman inside, lying on a blanket and reading a book, Justin screams.

She will scream again, as it happens, by this same hut, near the end of her story; Justin's creator endows memory with intricate patterns of repetition. Between these two outbursts, the girl finds herself "enchanted" and "bewitched" by the woman she has stumbled across. Ursula DeVane, 44, lives in a stone house her ancestors put up two centuries earlier; she shares the place with her younger brother Julian, a melancholy piano teacher whom ^ Ursula is determined to force into fulfilling his early promise as a concert performer. To this end, she has sacrificed her own career as an actress and successive parcels of the family's properties.

Or so she tells Justin. The growing friendship between the uprooted girl and the landlocked aristocrat shimmers with ambiguities and half-truths. Justin is flattered that a woman as haughty as Ursula seems genuinely interested in her and her disrupted perceptions. To find such a confidante in an alien place seems an answered prayer: "She lived the kind of life that reminded me a lot of the one we had lost." For her part, Ursula appears to take on this fledgling out of a mixture of kindness, boredom and the desire to create: "She's a clean slate. When she meets new people, or new challenges, she is free to respond to the unique demands of the moment." Ursula starts calling the hut where they first met, on the dwindling DeVane estate, Justin's "finishing school," the place where example will groom youth for the trials that await it.

This description proves accurate, but in ways neither of the friends could have imagined. Justin learns much from her mentor, including the necessity of betraying and abandoning her, of finishing an evil that Ursula's school had hidden from its inception. The vague outlines of this conclusion are visible in the first few pages of Justin's narrative; the hows and whys appear with deliberate speed and stunning effect. Godwin's account of the making of a forcibly modern heroine (career, two failed marriages) uses nearly every trick in the book, circa the 19th century. Good Dickensian fun is had with Justin's Aunt Mona, a kind but stereotyped soul who cannot resist mentioning, regardless of context, the advantages that life has failed to bestow upon her. But Mona's idiosyncrasy serves more than comic relief. She emerges as exactly the sort of woman who would marry, and then separate from, the kind of man who would naturally feel obliged to assist Justin--at just the moment when his kindness can do the most harm.

Nothing, ultimately, is wasted in The Finishing School. Every character and scene leads somehow toward an inexorable crisis. Simply coasting on the surface of this tale, while waiting for the crash, is most enjoyable. Those readers who want to know why they are having such a good time can stand back and appreciate Godwin's skill. She has taken some timeworn contrivances and shown, by example, why storytellers invented them in the first place: to ! heighten life into story, to funnel random experience into manners, morals and destiny.