THE GOLD-HATTED LOVER

An adult bedtime story has a sophisticated to seductive allure, and spends a few weeks in Greece with Tom Macpherson, a vice-consul who had been stationed in Salonika for five years and had chosen the Foreign Service as a ""reasonable equivalent"" to the Foreign Legion. He is joined by Bradley Cole whom he had once known at Princeton, Gloria, Cole's wife, Patrick Lanahan, a professor on leave from his family, and Vera, a native girl who agrees to show them around. Before long, sipping wine in the sunshine and ouzo in the tavernas, they are all wearing vine leaves; Bradley's obvious restlessness with Gloria leads on to the point where he leaves her- to ""straighten himself out"" with Vera; and Tom, after an unsettling, tantalizing exposure to Gloria, has the right-of-way he wanted- only to find that his conscience is too much with him, her love not quite enough... All of this, the defeated lover, the affair manque, has a rueful and attractive appeal. Keeley, who wrote The Libation (Scribner) earlier, and is also now introducing Six Greek Poets on the Knopf list, has obviously written it as a diversion- which it is.