BOOK REVIEW / NOVEL : A Moving, Humorous Look at 3 Generations : GUPPIES FOR TEA <i> by Marika Cobbold</i> ; St. Martin’s/Thomas Dunne $20.95, 287 pages

Though the title suggests a memoir of life among a family of merry English eccentrics, “Guppies for Tea” is anything but flippant.

Instead, the novel is a perceptive examination of three generations of women and the difficult relationship among Selma Merryman, a once-vibrant matriarch now an unwilling resident in a nursing home; her self-involved and pathologically obsessive daughter, Dagmar, and the 31-year-old granddaughter, Amelia, a winsome but feckless young woman deeply moved by her grandmother’s misery.

When the novel opens, Amelia is living in a rural English village with her lover, Gerald Forbes, a sometime painter-turned-country lawyer. He had fallen in love with Amelia during his artistic phase, but now that he’s settled down in a family legal practice, her fey humor and charming impulsiveness have ceased to delight him.

Gerald now wants someone solid, efficient and unencumbered by other responsibilities. Though aware that Gerald’s feelings toward her have changed, Amelia has no idea that her successor is Gerald’s sexy, uninhibited secretary, Clarissa, or that she’s already in place.

In telling this story, Marika Cobbold manages to temper irony with compassion. Cherryfield nursing home and its brusque, patronizing staff offer splendid opportunities for the writer’s tart humor.

Unflinching in her descriptions of the indignities endured by the aged and infirm in all such places, the author makes Amelia sympathetic, but also permits her to show impatience, exasperation and even revulsion.

Amelia is good, but never too good to be true. Expecting to be looked after by the faithless Gerald, she is thrust by default into the unnatural position of being a caretaker herself, a role for which she’s totally unprepared.

Selma Merryman’s son, Robert, has summarily sold his mother’s house and decamped to Brazil; her daughter, Dagmar, is too mentally unbalanced to be of any use. All this leaves Amelia to shoulder the entire burden of consoling her grandmother.

At first the task is not too onerous--a matter of frequent visits and optimistic promises that Selma will be out of the nursing home and with her family for Christmas.

Still believing in the permanence of her relationship with Gerald, Amelia assures Selma that she will be able to bring her to the house she shares with him. So far, Amelia has been unable to tell her grandmother that her own beloved home has been sold and already is occupied by the new owners.

Amelia has gone along with the fiction that Selma is in Cherryfield only because of an infected foot, though that illusion becomes increasingly hard to maintain. In fact, Selma has deteriorated mentally as well as physically, a tragic alteration that Amelia cannot bear to admit.

Fortunately, on one of her visits to Cherryfield, she meets a pleasant young naval chaplain, the son of another resident. Mature beyond his years, he not only offers Amelia sensible advice, but a friendship that quickly deepens into love.

No one ever needed romance more. Amelia has caught Gerald in flagrante delicto with Clarissa, and he has coldly informed her that he expects her to move out of their house in short order. While she still has a roof over her head, she bravely takes her grandmother out of Cherryfield for a visit that becomes a tragi-comic ordeal.

Once Selma is returned to Cherryfield, matters quickly go from bad to worse. Her physical condition worsens while her periods of lucidity grow briefer and further apart. Now thoroughly aware that her grandmother is terminally ill, Amelia embarks upon an outrageous and desperate scheme to give her the promised Christmas at home.

The emotional ordeals of the past few months have turned her from a scatterbrained girl into a resourceful and competent woman, though not many people would voluntarily choose Amelia’s road to self-realization.

Enlivened by quirky and original observations, her arduous journey is affecting, enlightening and often wryly humorous.