Prig's Progress

REAL PEOPLE by Alison Lurie. 180 pages. Random House. $4.95.

Janet Belle Smith, 42, is a minor short-story writer who is appreciated for her cultivated prose and sensitivity. Each summer she leaves her husband, an insurance exec, and her children for a stay at Illyria, a 500-acre arts preserve where writers, musicians, painters and sculptors create in secluded studios beneath hemlocks and pines. Tap-tap, tinkle-tinkle, scrape-scrape go the creative artists. Presumably, the hemlocks and pines murmur.

During her latest visit to Illyria, Janet settles down to a pallid little ghost story, only to be distracted by a long overdue awareness of her own insubstantiality. She is also distracted by other guests: an old platonic friend who she discovers is a homosexual, an alcoholic has-been novelist, a professional East Village poet who probably writes off LSD experiences as business trips, and a sexy, uncouth junk-sculptor.

In a series of soft implosions of self-perception. Janet realizes that she has been denying her impulses as a writer. She is guilty of self-censoring the matter and treatment of her work in order not to embarrass her family or jeopardize her suburban status. She vows that in the future she will make use of hate, envy, lust and fear. But for a woman who believes that art is condensed reality in the way that concentrated orange juice is the essence of a healthy breakfast drink, such a midyear's resolution will scarcely be enough.

In her previous novels, Love and Friendship, The Nowhere City and Imaginary Friends, Alison Lurie has earned a reputation as a dry satirist by preying on such vulnerable chickens as the academic life, extramarital affairs, Los Angeles as nightmare, sociology as pseudo science, and flying-saucer cultism as false religion. As a subject, Miss Lurie's minor lady writer is not exactly a meal-in-itself, although the author again demonstrates her special skill at killing swiftly, cleanly and coldbloodedly.

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