Tummy-Ache

THE PARASITES (305 pp.)--Daphne du Maurier--Doubled ay ($3).

"The bath water . . . pours from the taps with a great splash of sound, and as it runs you sing above it . . . It's funny, Maria would think, soaping herself with a loofah, that in the evening, if you have a bath, your tummy is round and rather full, but in the morning it is flat as a board, and hard."

Daphne du Maurier's new novel (her first about contemporary life since 138's bestselling Rebecca) is so plumply padded with this sort of verbiage that it resembles a kind of composite morning & evening tummy--round, full, and yet flat as a board. Replete with bestselling ingredients. The Parasites is constructed on layer-cake lines, i.e., a chapter about the dismal present is sandwiched between two flashback chapters about the glamourous past. Three main characters, members of the Delaney family, take turns telling the story. All get their chance to report in a chapter how they were seduced in their youth and, in the next, how they were reduced to frayed middle age--a sort of time-consuming part singing by a glee club that has known better days.

Theirs is not an easy relationship. Glamourous Maria is the illegitimate daughter of a lusty old singer whose tender renderings of songs such as Ah, Moon of My Delight caused whole cities to burst into loud sobs. She is in love with sensitive Niall, who is the illegitimate son of the singer's wife, in her own day a popular dancer. The only legitimate fruit of the muses' union is daughter Celia, who is as sedate and unromantic as a registered ccw--the invariable fate, in such fiction, of those unfortunate enough to have been born in wedlock. Maria has become a popular actress; Niall, a composer of popular song hits; Celia, a self-sacrificing homebody. But all three have reached John Marquand's "point of no return" with the conviction that they have frittered away their talents through vanity and laziness.

Without doubt, the Delaneys have a family dilemma worthy of the pen of

Marguerite Steen or a Taylor Caldwell. Yet Author du Maurier, soap her bohemian loofah as she may, fails to froth up a single sud of glamour or blow one bubble of poignant sadness. Even the title she has chosen suggests that Author du Maurier may have felt like apologizing a bit for having run so much bath water to so little purpose.

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