A HOUSE IN FLANDERS

Pallid evocation of a summer spent in 1951 with family acquaintances in a sprawling French country house. Jenkins, now British Ambassador to the Netherlands, recalls the foibles, the petty rivalries, the domestic rituals of the various ``tantes'' and ``oncles'' he encountered during his stay, when he was but 14 years old. The family Jenkins visited centered on five women—Tantes Yvonne, Florence, Alice, ThÇräse, and Lise. Rounding out the cast are Alice's bumbling husband, Auguste, several thirtysomething children, and a handful of servants. Each individual is depicted as a well-worn stock figure: Yvonne is portrayed as elderly, unmarried, self-sacrificing, wise; ThÇräse as fawnlike and vulnerable; Alice as assertive and tightfisted; Florence's daughter, Madeleine, as dutiful but frustrated and longing to escape to Paris. One of the more effective vignettes describes the visit of a former German soldier who'd been billeted in the house during the Nazi Occupation—but here, as elsewhere, Jenkins shies away from expressing the issues in clear-cut terms and drains the confrontation of dramatic tension. Comparisons to Peter Mayle's books are probably inevitable. But where Mayle revealed a winningly idiosyncratic vision of a stranger's life in France, Jenkins remains a cipher and his adventures curiously uninvolving. (Illustrated with undistinguished line drawings.)