Books: Smooth But Not Velvet

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THE SMALL HOURS OF THE NIGHT (232 pp.)—Timothy Angus Jones—Houghton Mifflin ($2.75).

Her name was Ekaterina and she was a real princess. Her husband, of course, was a real prince; his name was Nicolas. They lived at the Ritz in Paris with Ekaterina's father, an old expatriate king, and they had nothing to do but rock around all night in Montmartre nightclubs and drink buckets of champagne, because the old king still got about $3,000,000 a year from the old country. When Ekaterina and Nicolas took a shine to 20-year-old Barnaby Surrey, he thought it too wonderful to be true.

What a few months of dusk-to-dawn boozing with his jaded, royal pals did to Barnaby is the story of this first novel about high life in postwar Paris. F. Scott Fitzgerald could have done wonders with these rootless idlers. So could the Hemingway of The Sun Also Rises. But Barnaby just falls in & out of love a couple of times and eventually concludes that "things happen as they happen, and it is a waste of time to vex ourselves with what they are and why they come."

Young (26) Author Timothy Angus Jones is the son of Sir Roderick Jones, onetime chairman of Reuters news agency. His tightly written novel is smooth and credible. But his mother, Enid (National Velvet) Bagnold, could teach him a thing or two about storytelling.