Neapolitan Peep Show

MONA LISA (Vols. I, 2, 3; 1,267 pp.] --Tiffany Thayer--Dlal ($12.50).

Heaven only knows how many women have despairingly practiced the Mona Lisa smile since Leonardo da Vinci painted her around 1505. And what was she smiling about anyway? Sixteen years ago Tiffany

Thayer, a writer of meretricious bestsellers (Call Her Savage, Thirteen Women), accepted the challenge to find out. The years passed, and with advertising copywriter jobs (now Pall Mall cigarettes) to keep him from want, Author Thayer learned Italian and let his fancy run riot. It ran to 47,000 handwritten pages. A more fastidious publisher might have been appalled by so mountainous an exercise in bad taste, but Dial Press President George Joel, who has made a killing with the sexual leers of Frank (The Foxes of Harrow) Yerby, decided on one of the most massive gambles in recent U.S. publishing history. He decided to launch Mona Lisa, a novel that will run to some 21 volumes.

Published this week are the first three volumes (boxed and priced at $12.50). Breathlessly the publisher confides that "no one, absolutely no one but Tiffany Thayer, could have written it." No one is apt to quarrel with him, for Author Thayer has reached an Everest of vulgarity that may well stand as a mark until standards of literary decency are chucked entirely. His fancy is that Mona Lisa is written by French Poet Francois Villon; it turns out to be a between-the-sheets foray into the political brawls and sexual excesses of Renaissance Italy. It begins with the hero. Giovantonio Del Balzo-Orsini, lying under his mother's bed as she submits to her wifely duties, and it maintains that level of fictional and historical curiosity throughout. Prominent in the milling cast of characters is a queen of Naples whose appetite for men is inextinguishable. Pretending to be interested in Italian political squabbles, Author Thayer really saves his most conspicuous talents for scenes that normally have their origin in lecherous fantasy. A drool trickles from the wiseguy, smoking-car prose, and each orgy is dropped with a reluctance that promises another bout in the next chapter. The promise is kept, to the point of bedroom boredom.

And Mona Lisa herself? At the end of these three volumes she is not yet born and will not be until the end of the next set of volumes. She may never make it. The economics of publishing being what it is, it is barely possible that not enough readers will pay their way in to bring a smile to the face of anyone connected with the enterprise.

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