Elusive Echo

Elusive Echo

THE EVENING OF THE HOLIDAY by Shirley Hazzard. 152 pages. Knopf. $3.95.

If they are gifted, young writers suffer the indignity of being compared to somebody else. So it was with Australian-born Shirley Hazzard when a collection of her short stories was published in 1963. As evocative as but perhaps less crisp than the young Katherine Mansfield? An ear for dialogue that matches Elizabeth Bowen's but lacks her sure sense of social structure? And somehow falls short of Rosamond Lehmann?

In this near-perfect first novel, 32-year-old Author Hazzard proves that she writes like no one except herself. And she proves it the hard way by choosing a worn theme that a single sentimental slip could have transformed into a ladies'-magazine romance. Sophie, not-too-young, not-too-attractive, visits Italy and meets Tancredi, a dapper, middle-aged architect living apart from his wife and family. Because Sophie seems to him like a piece of important information he must acquire, Tancredi sets out to seduce her. Sophie finally, almost wearily, succumbs. Then the cool lovers discover that they are madly in love--but briefly, advisedly and with muted consent. Eventually they part.

Much of the book's charm arises from the fact that the reader never quite discovers how Author Hazzard makes a small masterpiece out of such unlikely material. Partly it is because her prose is so understated that it forces the reader to become uncommonly attentive. But mostly it is because she chooses her words with such delicacy and precision that even ordinary situations acquire poetic shadings.

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