No Fizz

THE FOOLISH GENTLEWOMAN (330 pp.) --Margery Sharp--Little, Brown ($3).

Margery Sharp has a sharp eye. But it takes more than that to be a really good writer. In her slight, pleasant novels (The Nutmeg Tree, Cluny Brown) she has neatly observed the small, telling details of social manners that weightier novelists often pass by. Her special gift is sketching, snippily but without too much malice, the idiosyncratic types that seem still to populate the English countryside as in the days of Jane Austen. (This gift has paid off well; three of her novels have been chosen as monthly selections by the Book-of-the-Month Club.)

Her minor but respectable talents are not as successful in The Foolish Gentlewoman as in its predecessors. The novel begins promisingly enough. At Chipping Lodge on Chipping Hill, a pleasant, grassy spot eight miles from London, lives "sentimental, affectionate, uncritical Mrs. Brocken," together with mementos of her younger years and miscellaneous members of her family. Mrs. Brocken "had adored her husband and was very fond of her French peppermill. An old watering-can was dear to her because she remembered seeing the gardener use it on her mother's rose-beds, and a new alarm-clock, because it was so nice and bright. She had thus many small sources of pleasure, inoperative perhaps on deeper intellects, which, added together, made a sort of comfortable wooly garment for her mind."

Temporarily ensconced at Chipping Lodge is Mrs. Brocken's brother-in-law Simon, the sort of crabbed but basically kindhearted curmudgeon who has been a reliable fixture of English novels for several centuries. Simon is decidedly hostile to modern life: "I look back to 1912 as the highest point of civilization, from which we have been steadily retrogressing ever since." Together with some mildly romantic young folk, Mrs. Brocken and her brother-in-law manage to live in pleasant decorum, with each member of the household sensible enough to mind his own business and respect the others' peculiarities.

But then comes Tilly Cuff. An angular, screechy older cousin of Mrs. Brocken, this creature, "yellow as a plucked chicken," is a busybody who can "scent a private conversation as a cat scents fish." Her cheeks hideously rouged, her arms like drumsticks and her gown some 20 years behind the fashion, Tilly barges into the well-arranged life of Chipping Lodge to create havoc. Mrs. Brocken has invited her because she has a guilty recollection of having, in girlhood days, maliciously prevented Tilly from accepting the one marriage offer ever to come her way. Now, as recompense, quixotic Mrs. Brocken proposes to turn all her money over to poor, nasty Tilly.

This situation is promising, but it never quite pays off. For one thing, about halfway through the novel the reader gets an uneasy suspicion that Miss Sharp is trying to smuggle in a little Heavy Thought with the froth. What's worse, neither the comic nor dramatic possibilities of the clash between Tilly and Simon are fully exploited. In the end, the novel has no more sparkle than decarbonated soda water. But even flat soda can quench a summer day's thirst.

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