Bonjour, Tristesse

By Martha Duffy

TITLE: SIN

AUTHOR: JOSEPHINE HART

PUBLISHER: KNOPF; 164 PAGES; $19

THE BOTTOM LINE: This portentous novel is full of guilty secrets, but the wages of wrongdoing may be tedium.

THE SIN IN THE TITLE IS ENVY. Iago, weep. In her second book -- her first was last year's best-selling Damage -- British novelist Josephine Hart has concocted a silly piece of romantic formula and fitted it out with enough heavy portents to sustain a Greek myth. "They say the veil that hides the future from us was woven by an angel of mercy," she muses. Or, "Novelists of our own lives, making ourselves up from bits of other people, using the dead and living to tell our tale, we tell tales." And this is only in the prologue.

Ruth, a beautiful harpy, was born after her mother and father had adopted their tiny niece Elizabeth, whose parents had been killed in a car accident. Ruth loses no time in stating her lifelong position: "I came wrapped in a caul of darkness and anger into Elizabeth's kingdom." Her cousin is, in fact, a preternaturally good child, so Ruth cultivates meanness and petty thievery with gusto. She hides Elizabeth's favorite dolls and into adulthood wears her clothes on the sly. Elizabeth paints (skies only); Ruth toys with starting a publishing imprint (her first book would be a reissue of Ambrose Bierce's The Devil's Dictionary).

Both young women marry, but of course Ruth wants Elizabeth's husband. The first one eludes her by dying; "I had been robbed of my prey," she frets. She nails his successor, however, and the acquisition of that man, a chilly, - dodgy character himself, takes up most of the action of the story.

Thank heaven all the characters in this cheerless book have enough money so that they can skip from London to country and from town house to studio when the need arises, as it so often does. Their conversation is spare and broody and liberally sprinkled with dots: "I lack the . . . the stamina . . . yes." Along the way the cliches mount, crowned by the blatant use of children's deaths to prod the action toward some kind of climax; otherwise Sin would be a serial. Here's hoping the other six vices are not on Hart's agenda.