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VILLA MILO, by Xavier Domingo (192 pp.; Braziller; $4). Paco, the hero of this flavorsome but uneven novella, is a foundling growing up in a brothel. The madam, the preposterous Dona Fili, is his presumptive mother. Blanca, one of the prostitutes, is his mistress--business and her moods permitting. Acting as a combination waiter and pimp, Paco has for spiritual adviser the fat priest Don Teodulo Vena, a sensualist given to topsy-turvy metaphysics, who may be Pace's father. Don Vena explains that he is a habitue of the villa because his body, which is part of God, demands it: "I act well with God. I give him good food and good women. I want to go to heaven." Paco himself fluctuates between elation and despair in this diverse amalgam of nihilism and jollity, which is sometimes reminiscent of Beckett but spiced with Hispanic gusto.

TURN OF THE WHEEL, by Roger Vailland (179 pp.; Knopf; $3.50). Milan, an interior decorator, and his wife Roberte, come from Paris to live in the country, squabble, drink, and toss hard truths at one another like bottles of vitriol. Why? Because, says Milan, "two lovers who love one another passionately can only detest each other, as the drunk detests liquor, the addict dope, the gambler cards, and the invert homosexuals." Helene, a nubile village schoolteacher, is fascinated by the couple's rantings about their free-loving and free-hating past. "Take her to bed and give us a bit of peace!" Roberte shouts at her husband. But Milan, weary of passion, lectures rather than letches. "What I love in you--rectitude, healthiness, integrity--is precisely what your love for me would destroy," he writes Helene. So Helene returns to her fiance, body unseduced but mind converted to an abort-as-you-go philosophy of premarital sex. Author Vailland, 54, can be both tough and mordant, as he brilliantly proved in The Law, a grim parable of the jostling hierarchies and jealousies in an Italian village. In Turn of the Wheel, written nine years earlier, his feuding couple are too clearly only paper marionettes, spitting out and dissecting the axioms that he puts into their mouths.

THE MIGHTY AND THEIR FALL, by I. Compton-Burnett (254 pp.; Simon & Schusfer; $4.50). With a country house and all its butlered, bachelored, dowagered, nurseried inhabitants, 70-year-old Ivy Compton-Burnett creates her own cosmos. Her scene is, like the Greek stage, mercilessly compact and periodically given to disquieting revelations and messengered melodrama. The Mighty and Their Fall concerns an enslaving, egocentric widower, Ninian, and his devoted daughter, Lavinia. Ninian decides to remarry. Lavinia becomes emotionally unhinged, a letter is mysteriously withheld, and a family will turns up with a deathbed injunction scrawled on it. By such classic Compton-Burnett devices, not only are the characters' outer fortunes made or marred, but their inner natures are thrust into the light. The mannered speech gives its human disclosures a fine comic intonation; what Compton-Burnett provides for life's stumbles and tumbles is a fiendishly polished floor.

MORNING IN ANTIBES, by John Knowles (186 pp.; Macmlllon; $3.95). John Knowles's second novel might seem more nearly satisfactory if his first, A Separate Peace, had not been flawless. His gaze at the soul's dark places is still direct, but in the shadows of the present novel, about the beach lizards of the French Riviera, there is both far less and far more than meets his eye.

Nicholas Bodine has come to Antibes and Juan-les-Pins to forget his wife, a philandering lady pianist. He is an American wanderer of European background, whose strongest characteristic is a persistent fretfulness and a concern for the color of clothes. What has maimed him, he thinks, is his frustrated passion for his bitch-wife, Liliane. But his strongest attachment is to a young, handsome male servant, an Algerian named Jeannot.

What ruins the book is not that Nicholas has homosexual leanings, but that the author appears not to understand this. While the novel's plot winds improbably toward a reconciliation between Nicholas and the hungrily passionate Liliane, the friendship between the hero and Jeannot burns bright and true, a forlorn adult parody of the boyish attachment between the two prep-school friends of A Separate Peace. Least convincing is the character of Jeannot, who is so nearly canine in his simplehearted loyalty that the reader expects him momentarily to dash into a burning building and carry out a trapped child with his teeth.

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