Quick, Nan, the Garlic Gun

DON'T TELL ALFRED (247 pp.)--Nancy Mifford--Harper ($3.95).

"I sat on my bed, looking at Alfred.

" 'Do we laugh or cry?' he said. 'Did you see the baby?'

" 'Not really. It seemed to be asleep.'

" 'Whose do you think it is?'

" 'Oh, surely theirs?'

" 'It's yellow.'

" 'Babies often are.'

" 'No, darling. I mean it's an Asiatic baby.'

" 'Heavens! Are you quite sure? I thought it was our grandchild.' "

The baby in question is 'Chang, named after Po Chang, the great Zen master who said, "When you are tired, sleep." David Wincham, bearded and sandaled eldest son of Sir Alfred and Lady Wincham, has picked up the stray Chinese tot, along with a dumb blonde wife and the lingo of Zen. According to the head psychiatrist at NATO, David is suffering from a "Pull to the East" that has carried him across the Channel and as far as the British embassy in Paris, where his father is serving as ambassador in the early '50s.

David is only one of the embassy oddballs, mostly relatives, with whom the narrator-heroine Fanny has to cope in Don't Tell Alfred. Another is Son Basil, full of spivish schemes such as a telly-rest coach for British tourists whose feet and palates are weak: "When they gets to the place they've come to seethe Prado, say, or some old world hill town in Tuscany, they just sits on in the coach and views the 'ole thing comfortable on TV while eating honest grub, frozen up in Britain, all off plastic trays, like in aeroplanes. If they wants a bit of local atmosphere, the driver can spray about with a garlic gun." In her seventh novel, Nancy Mitford (Love in a Cold Climate, The Blessing) has abandoned high comedy for low farce, swapped her Waughspish satire of manners for Wodehousean huggermugger.

Author Mitford puts rather too little wit and spirit into what is, at best, an awkward theme for comedy, the civil war between generations. Her sharpest jabs are scarcely meant to be funny and are aimed at that badly frayed bogeyman, the Americanization of the Old World. The book ends with a teen-age riot when Yanky Fonzy, a pasty-faced U.S.-type rock 'n' roller, is booked into Le Pop Club de France, escorted by two runaway idolaters from Eton--Fanny's younger sons, naturally. The Yanky Fonzy riot almost saves Don't Tell Alfred, but what it really needs is a garlic gun.

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