REALITY AND DREAMS

You know you're in the hands of a master when her sleek and suggestive new novel, a sophisticated comedy of manners, is so smart and seductive that you fail to notice how completely you've accepted a world gone utterly awry. Tom Richards, a prominent British film director, wakes in the hospital a near-cripple; days earlier he'd fallen off a crane while lensing a key scene in his latest effort, The Hamburger Girl, a Proustian mediation on a fleeting event: a real-life tableau from southern France of a girl preparing lunch on an outdoor grill. Tom's fantasizes about endowing this young woman with a fortune, a possibility that's nurtured by the huge wealth of his wife, Claire, an American cookie heiress who endures Tom's on-the-set adulteries by engaging in some illicit affairs of her own. Together, the two put up with their disappointing daughter, Marigold, a dull and censorious creature. Something of a ``natural disaster,'' Marigold cannot equal Tom's beautiful daughter from a previous marriage, Cora, who comes to his aid when Marigold disappears, an event covered in sordid detail by all the tabloids. A student of the ``redundancy'' that seems to be affecting everyone in England- -literally at work, and metaphysically at home—Marigold has hidden out among the less fortunate classes, paying back her parents for years of neglect. When Tom's film resumes production, reality and dream further intertwine: Actors confuse their roles with life, Tom's family behaves as if they were in a movie, and Tom himself rants on to his devoted new friend, a West Indian taxi driver with an absolutist sense of morality: a perfect antidote to all the sexual and emotional games being played on this social merry-go- round. The only reason we're never dizzy here is that Spark (A Far Cry from Kensington, 1988, etc.) remains in total control at all times: She can summon a world with a single gesture, a character with one seemingly artless remark. Profound art disguised as a lark.