Books: Neo-Pagan

ASPECTS OF LOVE (188 pp.)—David Garnetf—Harcourt, Brace ($3).

This book is like a game of musical chairs played in bed. Husbands and lovers, wives and mistresses are whisked in and out of each other's arms with such worldly wise frivolity as to suggest that English Novelist David ("Bunny") Garnett has snitched his basic idea from La Ronde. The biological hero of the novel is handsome Alexander Golightly (Alexis to his friends), who is in his late teens when Aspects of Love begins. Aspiring to the labors of Venus rather than Hercules, Alexis proposes two weeks of illicit bliss to Rose, a stranded French actress with a Greek drape shape. They withdraw to an unused south-of-France villa owned by Alexis' uncle. But the uncle, Sir George Dillingham, a 62-year-old Edwardian dandy steals a march on the lovers with his secret weapon ("The old Rolls stopped noiselessly outside"). Achieving complete surprise, Uncle George manages to detach Rose from Alexis.

After two years of army duty, Alexis comes home to London and finds Rose ensconced as his uncle's mistress. Alexis coaxes her into a bedroom reunion, but at this point and over the next decade, the plot begins subdividing like an amoeba: 1) Rose takes up with a 20-year-old named Vincent; 2) Sir George dies; 3) Alexis and another of Uncle George's girl friends, an Italian contessa, get high at his funeral and land flat in some French hay; 4) Rose's and Uncle George's daughter Jenny, by now a remarkably early-blooming 13-year-old begins stalking Alexis. At novel's end, Alexis runs off with the contessa, but in effect tells Jenny to go stand in a corner for five years until she is suitably aged for his gourmet pallet. If it ever took itself any more seriously than a popping champagne cork, Aspects of Love would be silly and embarrassing. But in his neo-pagan way, Novelist Garnett, 63, is deftly amusing. He also demonstrates that if an Englishman really tries, he can be a lot more Gallic than the Gauls —at least on paper.