BOOK REVIEWS : A Designer Novel Lacking Pattern

Never Say Goodbye by Gloria Vanderbilt (Alfred A. Knopf: $18.95; 195 pages)

When the market for designer jeans bottomed out, as it were, Gloria Vanderbilt leaped the vast chasm separating pants manufacture from belles-lettres and produced two volumes chronicling her remarkable life, both kindly received.

Though the distance between autobiography and fiction seems relatively narrow, “Never Say Goodbye” proves that the designer novel can be a risky venture. While a swan on the back pocket may sell jeans and a chaotic life satisfy public curiosity, a novel invites comparison of an entirely different order.

Told in brief bits and pieces from four different points of view, “Never Say Goodbye” not only needs brass rivets at the stress points, but a pattern. The apparent heroine is Jess, a dazzlingly beautiful widow who works as the manager of an art gallery. By a small margin, Jess has the most paragraphs, and by a larger margin, the most tragic life. Suddenly alone after a long and happy marriage, she has drifted into a series of dead-end affairs. Grafton, a sexually eccentric artist, was succeeded in her affections by the incumbent, Maclin Hollis, the television journalist who has been her lover for an unspecified number of years.

Though her passion for Maclin hasn’t cooled by a single degree, her forbearance is prone to frequent drastic dips. Maclin is indissolubly married to a woman named Billie, and has never shown any signs of breaking the bonds beyond assuring Jess that he’s embarrassed by his wife. This isn’t surprising, because despite the fact that Billie is now a successful artists’ agent in New York, she talks as if she just fell off the turnip truck, instead of growing up as the pampered daughter of the most successful chiropractor in the Midwest. Still, the peculiar lingo the author invents for Billie does serve to distinguish her from the other women, who sound completely interchangeable.

Jane is an English actress, presently filling Jess’ vacated peignoirs as one of Grafton’s lovers. Her American counterpart is Garnet, who obliges him when he’s on this side of the Atlantic. These two women meet and discover they like each other better than either of them likes Grafton. This is approximately the point at which the seams begin to unravel.

Garnet looks amazingly like Jess’ mother, who vanished mysteriously when Jess was a wee child. Ravishingly lovely, like all the other women except Billie, Dolores disappeared from Paris before World War II, leaving Jess to ponder her mother’s fate. Precisely midway through the book, Dolores turns up in a Russian sanitarium, writing in her diary. As Russian sanitariums go (or went before the recent reforms), this one seems pleasant enough, rather more like a modest spa than a place where state nuisances are sent to be rehabilitated.

Dolores, now in her 80s, has a best friend there with her, a woman named Brillianta Vosvi, incarcerated for equally obscure reasons. The diaries of these two elderly people are interspersed among the musings of Jane, Jess, Billie and Garnet, for reasons that become obvious, if not precisely clear, towards the last quarter of the novel.

The men--Grafton, Maclin, Jess’ father, the powerful Russian Nicolai Voznesenky--are seen only by refraction, the view depending upon the state of mind of the reporter. Since this is always emotionally disturbed, the male presence remains obscure, the reader left entirely unable to discover why anyone loves anyone else. According to the quartet of ill-used women (quintet if you count Dolores) the men are selfish, perverted and cruel; their lovers all gorgeous, competent, intelligent, strong, and, yes, financially blessed.

Apparently aware that a novel needs a dramatic event, the author has supplied a melodramatic and cataclysmic ending that sinks what might otherwise have been still another demonstration of Vanderbilt’s amazing versatility.