BOOK REVIEW : Zola’s Novel Still Shows What’s in Store : THE LADIES’ PARADISE <i> By Emile Zola</i> ; University of California Press; $45 cloth; $12 paper; 383 pages

It’s impossible to say, of course, but my guess is that Emile Zola would be amazed, appalled and pleased, in equal parts, to learn that an English-language edition of “The Ladies’ Paradise” has been available in recent years only through the graces of a management consulting firm.

Odd but true: Zola’s 1883 novel, which chronicles the life and extravagant growth of a fictional department store, has indeed been recognized as a classic--not by the academic community, it seems, but by the retailers whom Zola both mocked and celebrated.

As the president of Management Horizons Inc. noted in an introduction to the company’s 1976 limited edition of the novel, “The principles and techniques of ‘The Ladies’ Paradise’ are as pertinent to retailing today as they were one hundred years ago. . . .

It is a pragmatic guide which can be used in our time to increase the merchandising effectiveness of almost any retail store.”

The University of California Press has quite different reasons for republishing--literally, for the novel has neither been retranslated nor reset--the 11th volume in Zola’s fictional series depicting what he called “the natural and social history of a family during the Second Empire.”

“The Ladies’ Paradise” is a veritable treasure trove for deconstructionists, feminists and other cultural critics, for although it is a love story, most characters reserve their deepest passions for the pursuit of fine merchandise or the irresistible deal.

The novel doesn’t need the least bit of interpretation to be enjoyed, however, because it feels so modern.

This is the sort of book that inspired Tom Wolfe to write “The Bonfire of the Vanities,” and it’s easy to see that novel as a direct descendant of “The Ladies’ Paradise.”

“The Ladies’ Paradise” starts out conventionally enough, with a country girl’s arrival in Paris at the age of 20.

Denise Baudu’s parents are dead, and with two brothers to look after she hopes that her uncle, a draper, will provide her with work.

His business has begun to suffer, however, from the opening of a large store across the street--The Ladies’ Paradise, the very store before which Denise had stood in amazement moments after leaving the train station.

Bruges lace “spread out like an altar-veil”; flounces shaped into flowery garlands; columns draped with cloth, mantles and capes for all tastes and pocketbooks, dresses arranged in a kind of chapel “raised to the worship of woman’s beauty and grace”--Denise is awe-struck, never having seen the like.

Unable to give Denise a job, Uncle Baudu hopes to find her employment in another small store, but it’s soon evident that the only business with the desire and capital to expand is The Ladies’ Paradise.

Denise accepts a trial, commission-only position as a saleswoman in the dress department, where for months she is ridiculed for her mild, submissive manner and lack of sophistication.

She has met, by chance, the force behind The Ladies’ Paradise, the womanizing Octave Mouret. But he does not interfere when Denise is fired on a pretext after refusing the sexual advances of a store inspector.

Denise finds work at a silk shop run by M. Robineau, a former manager of The Ladies’ Paradise, but his attempt to compete with the ever-expanding department store proves a dismal failure; he advertises heavily, displays prices in the windows, and sells a few items below cost, but Mouret’s store has so captured the imagination of Parisian women that they believe his goods are superior even when Robineau’s fabric comes from the same bolt.

Denise knows Robineau is accelerating his fall into bankruptcy by keeping her on, so when she next meets Mouret, she accepts his offer to return to The Ladies’ Paradise.

Now knowledgeable about clothing and city ways, Denise this time is recognized as a rising star, a woman whose honesty and dependability are good for business--and whose reserved, virtuous behavior makes Mouret fall in love with her.

Denise isn’t a particularly beguiling character, but for that very reason she is the gravitational center of this rapidly spinning world.

Life and trade, economic disaster and triumph teem about her, and Zola, because he has anchored the novel in Denise’s principles, can indulge in loving descriptions of the treachery and rivalry upon which that world is built. Salesmen scheme with other salesmen to oust their boss, only to be undermined by former colleagues; saleswomen become mistresses in order to make a living wage; more respectable mistresses invite adversaries to their salons to test their lovers’ ardor; businessmen attend such salons to meet potential investors.

In “The Ladies’ Paradise” Zola has created a rich tapestry of Parisian life, and by the end of the novel the reader suspects that the revolution Zola implies has in fact occurred--that the dark, sweaty Age of Industry has given way to a bright, glowing, perpetually replenished Age of Commerce.

It hasn’t, of course. There’s a certain frisson to be had in reading this novel after R. H. Macy and Co., joining a long list of giants very similar to The Ladies’ Paradise, files for Chapter 11. Macy’s is likely to survive, and in Zola’s novel one can see not only the reasons for its success but also the seeds of its failure. Macy’s troubles are largely the result of ‘80s-inspired debt, yet one senses its debility is related to its becoming, like Mouret’s store, a machine that stresses money, growth, sales and profitability over customer service.

“Was it humane, was it just,” asks Denise of Mouret, “this frightful consumption of human life that the big shops carried on every year?”

Denise refers to the treatment of employees, but given Zola’s evocative, equivocal portrait of The Ladies’ Paradise, her comment might also apply to those who have experienced consumer lust--which is to say, just about everyone.

Next: Carolyn See reviews “The Place Where Souls Are Born” by Thomas Keneally (Simon & Schuster).