By Love Possessed

THE NICE AND THE GOOD by Iris Murdoch. 378 pages. Viking. $5.75.

It is a compliment to the mischievous skill of Iris Murdoch that her ten previous novels--notably Under the Net, The Unicorn and The Red and the Green--have kept critics guessing about the direction in which her talent might develop. The Nice and the Good may give them a sad clue, for the answer seems to be middle-age spread.

Her subject is still love, the variety of its comic faces and the delusions and dark necessities upon which it feeds. But now the problems are well within the grasp of a marriage counselor. Gone are the Murdochian sexual extravaganzas that only a dash of sly metaphysics kept from degenerating into peep shows. Sex in The Nice and the Good is nearly just that.

The subjects of Miss Murdoch's examination are met at a charming summer house in Dorset by the sea. The house belongs to Octavian, a fat, well-placed government official who loves his wife Kate (despite an occasional lapse involving his secretary), and cheerfully allows her to take in a widow with son, a divorcee with twins, a Dachau survivor and Latinist, and Octavian's brother, a failed India hand. The couple's dear friend, John Ducane, is a constant visitor, a wealthy bachelor lawyer who is so far gone in his infatuation for Kate that stolen kisses in the woods and furtive fleshly pressures can no longer keep him docile.

John is more than Kate's admirer in residence. He is so nice, so good and so just that he is virtually dragooned into acting as Big Daddy to all the others. Does the divorcee fear an old lover's return? Speak to her, John. Does Willy, the Dachau victim, seem about to go under in private gloom? Have a word with Willy, John. But the role of father-confessor plus Mr. Fixit is really a trial to him. He is having troubles of his own as he is trying to dodge an old mistress to devote his repressed, puritan self to the torturing game he plays with Kate. Author Murdoch knows her lovers through and through, and can prove with almost careless skill that they love for the wrong reasons or not at all. Even depressed Willy can tumble a friend's mistress in the friend's own bed and intone: "This is sacrilege, my Jessica. A very important human activity." In the end, however, just about everyone winds up with a proper mate.

One has to be careful with a Murdoch ending: Is she, perhaps, spoofing the conventional novel as well as the curative powers of love? Yes, but her occasional barbs are more like twinges of a habit not yet kicked. This is a well-written and well-meant novel of lovers gone astray but saved by love. If more is meant, Iris Murdoch, a gentle ironist, conceals it too well.

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