BOOK REVIEW : A Deft, Detailed Portrait of Upper-Class Artists and Their Rich Patrons : SWALLOW HARD<i> By Sarah Gaddis</i> Atheneum $19.95, 315 pages

It is interesting that a writer as young as Sarah Gaddis--who was born in 1955--is writing the sort of socialite novel that reached its pinnacle in America in the 1920s with the novels of F. Scott Fitzgerald.

Like Fitzgerald, Gaddis is a master of social nuance and detail. And yet, also like Fitzgerald, she relies too heavily at times on emblematic gestures in depicting the foibles of the upper class. Sometimes the story gets buried under a narrative hush: a beautiful but anti-dramatic patina of social detail.

Gaddis’ strongest gift is her deft characterization of the upper-class world of artists and their wealthy patrons. This talent for creating character produces such wonderful comic inventions as the breezy Pauline Dampierre, who plays a sort of cameo role: “Her name was Pauline Dampierre and she wore mended cashmere sweaters. She wasn’t in love with Lad Thompkins, but she believed in him.” Notably, it is Pauline’s 20-foot-high doll house that symbolizes the chasm between the world of the filthy rich and the workaday world of Sally Ann, Thompkins’ ordinary wife.

When Thompkins meets Sally Ann, the Southern girl who follows him home from the dance--to paraphrase the words of Lad’s best friend, Douglas Kipps--Thompkins already has published a few stories in the New Yorker. His future stretches before him, assuredly golden, but he will have to pay for this literary fame. He drives his wife away with bemused neglect; neither can he give his daughter, Rollin, his parental or artistic imprimatur.

Sally Ann, a former Miss Cotton Queen, becomes the wife of a great man sheerly by accident--the accident is their daughter’s conception. And so Rollin is born in New York City under unremarkable circumstances. Her father, the famous-writer-to-be, is the first to notice a distinctive mole “in her eye.” Thompkins views the mole with “relief and pride.” Her mother, who fears her own ordinariness, who senses that her own existence always will be a sort of annoyance to the genius she has married, says about the newborn Rollin: “I guess somebody figured she wasn’t a boy so she didn’t have to be perfect either.”

At the hospital, her father discovers an enormous giraffe from F. A. O. Schwarz. The giraffe, his wife’s hospital bill and practically everything they eat or wear is paid for by Pauline. It is fitting that Thompkins leaves the hospital with the outsized giraffe, a suitable companion for the drunken walk he takes around town. Sally Ann has said she cannot have the animal in the room. Even the gift card was in French:

“I don’t know anything about France or anything that goes along with it,” Sally Ann had said after she met Pauline.

Sally Ann had grown up in a small Southern town, and when Winifred Kipps (Douglas’ wife) remarked that, actually, Pauline hadn’t been happy since she’d lived in France, Sally Ann had asked why didn’t she go back there then. “A woman who grew up with a 20-foot-high doll house with Chippendale furniture copies in it, I guess she can choose the country she wants to live in.”

Sally Ann grows “obsessed with the doll house and had a faraway look on her face whenever she spoke of it.” Whereas Sally Ann remains forever uninitiated into the world of real artists and the quiet rich who pay their children’s nursery bills, Rollin is allowed to enter--up to a point--the sanctum sanctorum of high society and art.

It is easy to see the influence here of Fitzgerald. There is a tristesse to the tone, a delicate, old-fashioned quality to the storytelling, that reminds the reader not only of “Tender Is the Night” but also of the recent novels of Richard Yates, who writes better than anyone in the postwar period about middle-class striving, alcoholism, the desire for greatness, youthful dreams of creating art.

Sally Ann, Lad Thompkins, Pauline Dampierre and Rollin’s bad-boy godfather, Douglas Kipps--all of these characters, their drunken heartbreak, their inability to love or be loved, vividly recall the heroes of social realism of an earlier period.

Sarah Gaddis seems to reach back to a time of literary innocence when telling the story of someone’s life was reason enough for writing a book. Unlike Fitzgerald’s heroines, or shipwrecked heroes of Yates, Rollin goes on to work out her complicated legacy and to free herself from judgments not only of her father and godfather but also of arbiters of taste who cluster around them. (Gaddis is the daughter of author William Gaddis.)

Finally, this is a novel about a young woman’s apprenticeship as a painter. Reluctantly, the heroine comes to accept that the central struggle of her life must be her art and that she must grant herself the approval her elders stubbornly withhold. Try as she will to mediate between the quotidian concerns of her mother and the extravagant stoicism of her father, Rollin Thompkins must “swallow hard” and go on perfecting her craft.

Singer is the author of “The Petting Zoo” and “Footstool in Heaven.”

Next: Elaine Kendall reviews “An Awfully Big Adventure” by Beryl Bainbridge (Harper Collins).