Love-Child Conquers All : THE HEARTS AND LIVES OF MEN<i> by Fay Weldon (Viking: $28.95; 357 pp.)</i>

Little Nell, in this grown-up fairy tale, is a love child in the genuine sense of the word, conceived at the first glance exchanged by her parents at a party in 1960s London. As the prompt result of a blissful consummation, she preserves, through the ups and (more usually) downs of her parents’ marriage, something of the radiant happiness of their first moments of mutual discovery. Nearly aborted by a panicking mother, she survives to become a Christmas Day baby, attended by astrological omens that give her an uncanny ability to attract dangerous events and nasty people into her benevolent orbit, but from infancy, she shines like a good deed in a naughty world.

Her mother, Helen, is a nice, sensible, pretty young thing, whose apparently fey character grows in strength throughout the book, triumphing over the adversity of some unfortunate marriages, until years later, she blossoms as a prominent dress designer, hardened by the early experience of divorce from Nell’s father, Clifford.

From the outset, Clifford is destined to be a celebrity, a London art dealer rapidly on the rise, not yet quite famous for being famous but fully aware of the advantages of a high profile in the art-schmart world of international dealing. Undoubtedly skilled both in commerce and connoisseurship, he is also a user, discarder, and wounder of women. Clifford’s doubtful achievements bring with them the punishment of having to marry his mistress, than which few worse fates could be devised.

The mistress, Angie, belongs to a rather stagy cast of villains who represent the massed forces of Evil. She is rich beyond her deserving, with a few South African gold mines to keep her in mink and outbid any wool-clad opponents. Angie can well afford to make up for her inferior looks by buying whatever she wants in life, whether it is culture or revenge. Art galleries rise and fall to her manipulations, and this Queen-of-the-Night character has ample means to bide her time before she decides she can start “to upset a few people.”

The forces of good and evil are not allowed to play out their match without interference. They are pursued by the author’s voice intruding a commentary which is as unwelcome as a neighbor whispering throughout a movie. Fay Weldon has used this technique in earlier novels but never quite so insistently. It is a very feminine voice she writes in, as one would expect of so delicate a portrayer of pregnancy and childbirth, and the commentary is an odd mixture of triteness and shrewdness. “I am sorry to say . . .” too frequently introduces the author’s remarks on yet another moral lapse in her characters. There is too often a conflict between Weldon’s pity for her creations and her manipulation of them.

Is it too masculine to see her as overindulgent to the swinish Clifford, when she feels his overblown jealousy should be forgiven because he has deviously been given reasonable grounds for suspicion? Weldon is certainly too kind to Helen’s father, a boorish, bullying artist of growing fame, who feeds his genius by his ill-treatment of his submissive wife. The father’s slaughterhouse and torture paintings may be the finest artistic flower of their generation, but the domestic background in which they were nurtured is far from admirable. Too much is forgiven this half-mad genius because of a celebrity that turns out to have been partly engineered by the deft manipulations of Clifford’s gallery. The temperamental license of the creative artist is allowed to go well beyond the point of patient endurance.

“Wait, dear reader,” as our author would say. “Do not let yourself be put off by this glib, knowing commentator.” Halfway through the book, the chattering Chorus becomes less annoying, and it is a measure of the author’s skill that by the end the “dear reader” has come almost to welcome the commentary of the worldly wise lady in the next cinema seat. Instead of hushing her, we start agreeing and debating, perhaps with this view of marital discord:

“Into the great bubbling caldron of distress we call jealousy goes dollop after dollop of every humiliation we have ever endured, every insecurity suffered, every loss we have known and feared; in goes our sense of doubt, futility; in goes the prescience of decay, death, finality. And floating to the top, like scum on jam, the knowledge that all is lost: in particular the hope that someday, somehow, we can properly love and trust and be properly loved and trusted in our turn.”

Such ruminations should not give the impression of overwhelming seriousness in a novel with a strong vein of fairy-tale fantasy. Nell becomes a tug-of-love child, finds herself kidnaped, then in rapid succession is miraculously saved from an air crash and is bought by a rather endearing pair of elderly French black magicians who adopt her as part of a program of rejuvenation therapy. Spirited away from their mildly Satanic clutches, she casts up, traumatized but resilient, in an English home for “disturbed” children, but is soon off with the Gypsies to a hippie commune in remote rural Wales, kept buoyant by sheer niceness, however nasty her surroundings.

Even when mistakenly classed as mentally retarded, educationally sub-normal, even with her head shaved because of suspected head lice and hunted by dogs when she escapes from the mental hospital, Nell is a smiler and a survivor. Throughout her adventures, she has secretly carried a locket containing a precious jewel which is not only an amulet for her safety but eventually leads her back to her parents. Needless to say, it is she who reconciles them.

The embers of their marriage have never gone entirely cold. Helen’s love for Clifford has been kept alive by the belief that her daughter never really died in the air disaster. Nell proves this by reappearing as a self-possessed, artistic young woman with her redeeming happiness intact. The novel, which goes somewhat deeper than its mere story-line would suggest, ends with the message: “Reader, to the happy, all things come. Happiness can even bring the dead back to life.”