Old-Fashioned Abandon

THE FLOWER GIRLS (629 pp.) -- Clemence Dane--Norton ($4.95).

This novel has elephantiasis of the prose glands, but basically it is an anemic little yarn about an English theatrical royal family. Jacy Florister, 27, an ex-child star dangling rebelliously from maternal apron strings, has long wanted to know more about his deceased British father, whom his mother always refers to as "a moron." When poolside sex and liquor kill mother. Jacy quits Hollywood and flies to England to scratch around for his "roots." He not only digs up the Florister clan, a prolific, Barrymoreish brood whose blood lines rival the "begats," but also the girl of his dreams, a brunette witch of a first cousin named Olive.

When Jacy and Olive are not making beautiful bedchamber music together. Jacy is a gaga, gee-whiz tourist-about-London: "So this was the London bobby!" . . . " 'I am present.' said Jacy happily, 'at the reopening of the Covent Garden Opera House in nineteen forty-six . . .' " Somewhere along the line, Jacy discovers that the secret of English greatness is "continuity." To do his bit for continuity, Jacy agrees to help the Floristers reopen the historic old family theater with a hands-across-the-sea play about Pocahontas and John Smith.

Canny Clemence Dane butters her novel with surprises, ranging from the pleasant (Jacy's father turns up alive) to the downright distasteful (Olive turns out to be a nymphomaniac who believes that variety is the spice of love). But by novel's end, Jacy has found a Florister's one true love, the theater. A Book-of-the-Month Club choice for July, The Flower Girls sprouts eccentrics, melodrama, theater lore, subplots, flashbacks, deaths, alarums and excursions with engaging, old-fashioned abandon. Anyone who plans to while away a lazy summer afternoon with its 629 pages would do well to string up two hammocks, one for himself and another for the book.

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