Critics Who Condescend

By Martha Duffy

THE TRICK OF IT

by Michael Frayn

Viking; 172 pages; $17.95

Blessings on British writers! They are keeping the comic novel alive and well with very little help from other quarters. Perhaps it is the malign ghost of Evelyn Waugh that tweaks them into action, but A.N. Wilson's social satires and David Lodge's academic lampoons have a vigor and recklessness that are often in short supply in more serious work.

Michael Frayn is best known for his plays, especially for Noises Off (1983), a classic farce that burned up the box office on both sides of the Atlantic. The Trick of It, his sixth novel, is a swift little breeze of a book that buffets the pretensions of critics who condescend to popular art. Richard is a fussy young teacher at an obscure English university who becomes obsessed with an older, well-known woman novelist -- a figure like Muriel Spark or Anita Brookner. But unlike most of the weedy egotists who make convenient satirical heroes, Richard manages to possess his idol, whom he refers to as JL, and even marry her.

The book is a series of garrulous letters that he writes to a friend in Australia. He favors words like ludic and trots out gambits like "Her eyes are like Indian groceries. That's to say, they're open." Yet Richard yearns to influence his wife's work. Her latest novel, he tells her, needs a "strong central framework of ironic self-awareness." Published without any such carpentry, it becomes her biggest success. He hopes -- even expects -- that she will write about him, but learns to his chagrin that her next project will be about his relatives, particularly his rather drab mother. "My entire family lies gasping on the bank, waiting to be gutted and filleted," he mourns, "and turned into delicious fish-stew, while I'm tossed back into the river."

In the end this would-be Pygmalion is teaching JL's works in Abu Dhabi, where the college was hoping for classes on Dickens or Galsworthy. In a final attempt at revenge, he tries his own hand at fiction but cannot find "the gadget that makes it all work, the crystal, the chip, the formula . . ." Five synonyms later, he desists. The trick of it.