Paper Doll

LUCY CROWN (339 pp.)--Irwin Shaw --Random House ($3.95).

Lucy Crown keeps one in suspense at the end of every chapter. Will suburban housewife Lucy's summer indiscretion with a younger man turn her marriage to Oliver Crown into a lasting winter of discontent? Can the couple's 13-year-old son Tony grow into a healthy, normal American boy after he peeps through the cottage blinds and sees his mother in the arms and bed of his 20-year-old counselor-companion Jeff? Is humorless, self-contained Oliver to blame for it all be cause he treats his Hartford, Conn, printing plant as a religion and his wife as a hobby? For the answers to these and many other related questions, tune in to Lucy Crown, a bit of fictional hokey-pokey in 21 chapters by Irwin Shaw.

Though Lucy makes no visible mark on any literary target, it has already hit the bull's-eye of high finance. The Hollywood team of Hecht-Lancaster has paid Author Shaw the record prepublication sum of $400,000 for the film rights to his novel with a possible $350,000 more. His publishers are running off a fat initial printing of 50,000 copies, and Lucy seems assured of elbowing her way into top company on current bestseller lists.

The Dangerous Age. The bulk of the novel begins in flashback one summer day in 1937 when Lucy Crown examines her nude body in the mirror and realizes she has reached the dangerous age: "There are the little secret marks of time on the flesh of my thighs. I must walk more. I must sleep more. I must not think about it. Thirty-five." Hubby Oliver still appreciates her ("You have a wonderful belly"), but he is preoccupied, as usual, with getting away from their lakeside summer place for a busy, productive week at the plant. Lucy is left with her gangling adolescent son Tony and the college junior Oliver has hired to be the boy's teacher-companion. Jeff is bronzed and amiable with crew-cut good looks. Pretty soon he is lying awake nights "remembering the sound your dress made as you brushed past," while Lucy daydreams about Jeff's taut white T shirts.

In their eyes, their illicit love affair is full of many-splendored things, but the dialogue is not one of them. Sample:

"[Lucy]: 'You mustn't loom over me all the time.'

"Jeff sat on the floor ... his head near her waist. 'I like to loom over you.'

" 'Only at carefully specified hours,' said Lucy. She touched his head with her fingertips, on the back of his neck. 'Delicious,' she said. 'You must never let your hair grow long.'

" 'Okay,' said Jeff.

"Lucy ran her hand over his head. 'You have a hard persistent skull,' she said."

This golden banter, which already assays at well over $1,000 per page, requires hard, persistent skulls.

Ibsen's Nora. Taunted by a nasty-minded teen-age neighbor, young Tony takes his horrified peek at the lovers and tells his father all. Jeff does a fadeout, and Oliver almost pies his type in fury ("What kind of a woman are you?"). Lucy, who has been rather foggy about her identity, apparently thinks that she is Ibsen's Nora: "Up to now you've treated me ... as though I'm still twenty, to be cuddled, protected, patronized. Finally, in any important matter, disregarded . . . So--now--I no longer accept you."

Around the triplet corpses of their love, marriage and family, Author Shaw stages a 16-year wake. Oliver becomes a coarse, noisy drunk, joins the Army in World War II and dies in France. Lucy becomes a social worker and indulges in adultery as "a form of self-expression." Tony grows up a cynical misanthrope, exiles himself to a Paris slum.

Unearned Emotion. These hapless fates, all out of proportion to the original sin, recall James Joyce's idea that sentimentality is unearned emotion. The unearned emotion in Lucy Crown adds up to a massive debit account with reality. None of Novelist Shaw's characters has a self; each is a keyboard of self-melodramatics. No one acts; everyone attitudinizes. No one communicates; each merely tests the acoustics in the empty echo-chamber of his ego.

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