The Show-Off MOON TIGER

By Martha Duffy

Forget about Marguerite Higgins, Mary Welsh Hemingway or the shoulder-padded heroines whom Rosalind Russell used to play in the movies. Those female legends of the '30s and '40s may have been superwomen, but consider the perfections of Claudia Hampton, war correspondent, popular historian, prized sexual partner to many men. (Claudia is also a terrible mother, but that seems to go with the territory.)

She is beautiful, of course. "People notice one's association with Claudia," observes one of her lovers, a multimillionaire entrepreneur. "Men are envious -- women are impressed." Claudia is also formidable. Her only child Lisa cowers in the knowledge that she is too "pallid" to be a worthy offspring of this latter-day Artemis. Lisa's husband is understandably terrified of his mother-in-law too. "Damp handshake, damp opinions," sighs Claudia with a snob's sere accuracy. "At the very sight of me his vowels falter."

The achievement of Penelope Lively in her seventh novel, the surprise winner of the prestigious Booker Prize in England for 1987, is that she manages to evoke considerable sympathy for a character who could easily be a pompous bore. Lively sees her whole: an innocent in a shriveling world, determined to live on a heroic scale and frustrated by family and friends who fail her as companion demigods.

The high point of Claudia's career is her time as a war correspondent covering the desert campaign against Rommel. She goes at her assignment with gusto, typing in the jeep, pausing to shake the sand out of her typewriter. No wonder a weary colleague asks her to quit showing off. But soon she meets the love of her life, a tank commander named Tom Southern. The savvy reader of war fiction knows at once that earnest Tom will be dead within 50 pages, but Claudia is launched on a splendidly grand passion. And when finally the disastrous word comes from the front, she shows her saving grace: guts.

Claudia's great intellectual preoccupation -- as well as the thesis of her historical volumes -- is the random nature of history. Woe to the person who sees any order in the past; kaleidoscope is Claudia's favorite word. Effective enough at first, this aspect of Moon Tiger is overdrawn and finally tedious. A similar strain shows in what are by now familiar literary musings about the ancient stones and mysterious fossils around Lyme Regis. It is possible that Dorset should be cordoned off to novelists for a decade or so.

In old age Claudia is at last defeated by cancer, but she has a good death: "Gradually, the room is filled with light . . . and she is filled with elation." That puts her ahead of the dying Goethe, who, in his last words, had to ask for more light. Up in heaven, one can be sure, Claudia will use it against him.