Reverse Serendipity

MR. RIGHT IS DEAD by Rona Jaffe. 192 pp. Simon & Schuster. $4.50.

Rona Jaffe's bestselling first novel about nubile young career girls aprowl in Manhattan, The Best of Everything, was written to the specifications of the late Film Producer Jerry Wald. God knows who is responsible for this new collection of short stories in which Rona's girls suffer from serendipity in reverse--they have the gift of finding unpleasant things and situations not sought for. When these urban waifs encounter an attractive man, he's already married; if single, a homosexual; if both available and heterosexual, he is metaphorically dead.

The heroine of the title story is Melba Toast, "the skinniest stripper in America." Blonde and randy, Melba wears the longest fake eyelashes in New York and the tightest clothes. Aging millionaires delight in lending her their Cadillacs and shower her with $100 bills. Melba is a direct descendant of Lorelei Lee in Anita Loos's 1925 bestseller, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and, like Lorelei, has a mousy girl friend to come along on double dates.

So long as the action is confined to Madcap Melba charming a cop out of giving her a parking ticket, or a gangster into surrendering a restaurant phone, the story is readable enough and lively. But Rona Jaffe intends more. The mousy girl friend is in analysis and given to morose dissections of her emotions, ranging from jealousy of Melba to frustration about the men who get away. She has a strange preoccupation with necrophilia. When one romance collapses, the mousy girl laments that "social graces are dead, shyness is dead, chivalry is dead, game playing is dead, necking is dead, Mr. Right is dead, expectations of any kind are dead. Only the moment lives."

The other stories offer evidence of a surprising similarity in literary taste between Esquire and Rogue and such venarable ladies' magazines as The Ladies' Home Journal, in which they severally appeared. They deal with 1) a pair of young movie stars who get their kicks from phoning strangers, 2) a girl who tries to become the model mistress for man after man after man, 3) a four-party orgy that is so permissive it becomes a bore, and 4) a young man who takes his fiancee's beloved dog to a vet to be killed, to a taxidermist to be stuffed, and then leaves it, displaying a lifelike snarl, in the middle of the floor to welcome her home. It's clear he is not Mr. Right either.

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