Saxophone Age Orphan

THE WORLD IN THE EVENING (301 pp.)--Christopher Isherwood--Random House ($3.50).

The World in the Evening starts with a racket at a drunken Hollywood party; the sound comes from the hero's fists hammering on the roof of a children's doll house, inside which his wife is committing adultery with a movie actor. The book ends in a New York bar with the hero downing his fifth Martini and saying to his now exwife: "Do you know something . . . I really do forgive myself, from the bottom of my heart?"

What the hero has to forgive himself is the crack-up of two marriages. What the reader will have to forgive Author Christopher Isherwood is a second-rate novel that sounds no more than an echo to the stories Isherwood told better in Goodbye to Berlin and Prater Violet.

"Runaway Puritan." After catching her in flagrante delicto in the doll house, Stephen Monk walks out on his wife Jane and into an oncoming truck. While he convalesces at the home of his Quaker foster-aunt outside Philadelphia, his whole life flashbacks before his eyes.

By the world's standards he is a rich dead beat who has never done a lick of work in his 36 years. Born in America and educated in England, Stephen goes to Berlin in the '20s as "a runaway puritan." There he samples "every kind of pleasure, vice, shame and mental anguish," and returns to England a jaded 22, convinced that the only valid emotion is boredom, "or ennui as I preferred to call it." Into the midst of ennui steps an older woman named Elizabeth Rydal, a sensitive novelist of the Virginia Woolf persuasion, with grey eyes and a "long amused mouth."

The Golden Girl. Elizabeth Rydal is also on the rebound, not from ennui, but from a dead lover. She is busy on a novel about an "orphan of the Saxophone Age." Stephen marries Elizabeth, but the relationship is marred by Elizabeth's dedication to her first love, "this wretched novel--I'm so heavy with it, I feel sometimes as if I could scarcely drag myself upstairs." Stephen not only strays into an illicit affair, but also dabbles in homosexuality. Elizabeth, who makes a cult of "understanding," forgives all.

When Stephen meets and sleeps with Jane Armstrong, an all-American girl whose golden skin "you almost never see except on the bodies of idealized nudes on semipornographic wall calendars," First Wife Elizabeth accommodatingly dies of a heart attack. But the strain of living with a growing boy in turn proves too much for Second Wife Jane, and she takes to the Hollywood doll house.

Author Isherwood's prose still has the crisp grace of a good tennis match. He is an exterior decorator of chic and competence, whether the setting is Athens, the Alps, or the South of France. But by now he has splashed all the water out of his stagnant, neurotic pool and seems more and more like his hero--a high-and-dry orphan of the Saxophone Age.

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