Crack in the Teacup

THE LONG VIEW (320 pp.)--Elizabeth Jane Howard--Reynal ($3.75).

Women's instinct for tidiness inclines to deprive them of the power of making a true reminiscence. Dust and unsuitable objects are often removed from the rooms in which they choose to display the bric-a-brac and furniture of their lives. The bedroom, especially, is tidy after the event.

But for this fact, the novel The Long View might be a work of art. Its theme--the defeat of the ingrown English middle class--has been needleworked by such skilled knitters and tatters as Ivy (Men and Wives) Compton-Burnett and Elizabeth (The House in Paris) Bowen. The Long View knits up the raveled sleeve of middle-class tweed. As in the work of her greater exemplars, Author Howard shows the old, secure, middle-class family house to be falling, and her characters speak in those elliptical, strained asides of snooty English people who would rather drop a friend than an aspirate.

Antonia Fleming is beautiful; her husband Conrad is brilliant, but as a schoolmaster once wrote on his report, "bloody-minded." Antonia holds a dinner party to celebrate the engagement of her dim son, Julian, to an even dimmer girl. Her daughter Deirdre, pregnant by one man, is about to marry another. Antonia's husband has moved elsewhere. Antonia is found at her dinner table with her devoted maid clearing away from the table the service her husband will never use again, and mooning mistily on a possible affair with a tall, thin intellectual type. It is a situation in which many Hokinson-type matrons might like to find themselves, but Antonia prefers looking backward to the scenes of her foolish youth, when the worst disaster life had to offer was an unsuitable organdy dress her ringmaster-mother obliged her to wear to a party.

These lavender soap-opera elements are neatly mixed by Novelist Howard; skilled writing and a mother-in-law's eye for weakness of character make this novel a cucumber-sandwich cut above the average summer reading for women. It is one more study in the strange and terrifying fissures that scar the once sturdy heart of the British middle class. The means employed are female. Yet the reader with an attentive eye can see, as did Poet Wystan Auden, how "the crack in the teacup opens a lane to the land of the dead."

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