Corespondent: Italy

THE EXCHANGE OF JOY (250 pp.)--Isabel Quigly--Harcourt, Brace ($3.50).

The damage starts when Neddy tender considerate husband and rising young English architect, signs up for a 13-month job in Australia and packs Celia and the kids off to Forte dei Marmi on the Italian Riviera. There, at the beginning of a sun-soaked Italian summer, she meets the aging principessa and the principessa's current lover, Arcangelo, though Celia is too innocent to recognize him as such. She is quicker to sense the unsettling effects of the Italians upon her tidy and hitherto strait-laced life. She tries to tell the children's nanny about it: "They flourish somehow, they don't mind so much about . . . about what we mind, they're not so niggly -. . That's how I feel: niggly." Soon, Celia is feeling so far from niggly that before Arcangelo makes a proper pass at her, she completes it. She finds that adultery, which should disturb her gives her a knife-edged joy. Arcangelo is "one of the three best poets in Italy," and through his eyes she sees the glories of Florence and Siena, and in his arms plumbs depths of awakened passion Arcangelo commands (Neddy had never given her a direct order), he is fiercely jealous and he refuses to acquire the "matrimonial habits of good morning and good night and hallo dear. That's the end of love-habit." What stings Celia is the number of Arcangelo's past love affairs and the suspicion that she may be just one more sensual romp in the afternoon of a faun. The 36-year-old poet gives her a sign of stronger love and deeper trouble by making her the mother of his only child, a boy whom they name Michele. However, the child problem evaporates suddenly when an Oxford don who admires Arcangelo's poetry agrees to raise the boy.

But the basic dilemma remains unresolved, and in this first novel. Briton Isabel Quigly maintains it for so long that the plot caves in on her characters. With Neddy's return only days away, Celia is belatedly asking her lover: "What do people do, Arcangelo, in a situation like ours? What do they do? ... Catholics, I mean." The distinct suggestion is that the best the star-crossed lovers can hope for is some sort of intercontinental menage-a-trois. Author Quigly's story ranges from romantic intensity to limp sentimentality but in her evocation of the sensuousness the Italian scene, she reveals the real corespondent of her triangle--Italy.

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