Book Review : A Caustic Comedy With a Plot Too Delicious to Pass Up : PLUCKING THE APPLE <i> by Elizabeth Palmer</i> , St. Martin’s Press/A Thomas Dunne, $20.95, 272 pages

Ginevra Haye is an Oxford-educated art critic of some repute who cares nothing about her appearance. And why should she? Self-employed, she is intent on finishing an academic treatise and rarely leaves her cottage in Little Haddow; she has few friends, because of graceless, clumsy manners and careless, corpulent looks; and in any case her husband, Kevin, a bricklayer, is employed in Saudi Arabia.

Ginevra reserves most of her energy for intellectual work--and her “Little Haddow Kama Sutra” as well, the journal in which she fantasizes a steamy romance with art dealer James Harting, with whom she had her first sexual experience many years before. For the love of James, will Ginevra resolve to improve her figure and make the best of her attributes, thus forging a connection between her cerebral interests and her physical self?

For a time, especially after we learn that Ginevra is in fact losing weight and seeking counsel on her attire, it seems that “Plucking the Apple” may be following the path blazed by Fay Weldon’s wonderfully wicked “Life and Loves of a She-Devil”--boy beds girl, boy deserts girl, girl takes furious revenge.

That proves not to be the case, however; neither Ginevra’s appearance nor her journal come to mean much in the novel, as if author Elizabeth Palmer had changed its plot midstream.

Instead of focusing on this character, as one might expect from the early going, Palmer instead portrays with dark humor the romantic entanglements of four marriages, none particularly attractive. “Plucking the Apple,” a bestseller in Britain, is a caustic comedy of domestic manners, and, if it’s too diffuse and lightweight to rival Weldon’s best and blackest humor, it won’t be mistaken for a work by Anita Brookner, either.

The Careys are the central couple in the novel: Jack, the rising artistic star at the gallery run by James and Victoria Harting, and Ellen, Jack’s long-suffering, indispensable wife.

The gallery has scheduled an exhibition of Jack’s new work, but as deadlines loom, the work, as usual, doesn’t yet exist; Jack has been too busy cheating on Ellen to lift a paintbrush, and Ellen, at long last, is seriously thinking of divorce.

Things come to a boil when Jack takes up with James’ sister, Tessa Lucas--gorgeous, socially ambitious, nearly nymphomaniacal, and married. Tessa proves more than a match for Jack, being a woman as egocentric and willful as he, but with even less compunction and much less talent.

Palmer describes Tessa’s beauty as being “so potent that it currently transcended the emptiness of her head,” but that doesn’t prevent Tessa from devising an ingenious scheme to enrage both Ellen and her own husband, the brooding poet, Alexander, and thus clear her way to become the second Mrs. Jack Carey. As Tessa blandly tells her brother about spouses, “I don’t want the one I’ve got. I want a different one.”

Ginevra believes, we’re told early in “Plucking the Apple,” that “marriages were either made in heaven or in hell and there was not a great deal in between.” The hellish certainly dominate this novel: Ellen stays with Jack mostly for the children’s sakes, Alexander with Tessa almost exclusively for her dazzling looks, Ginevra with Kevin purely for the sex, their intercourse being limited exclusively to the sexual.

The Hartings alone appear to have a viable relationship, but only because of the art gallery, it seems; James suffers the often-insufferable Victoria in large measure because her ingratiating social skills are good for business. The one truly loving couple in the novel, ironically, is the battling Careys, for when synchronized--which admittedly isn’t often--Jack and Ellen are capable of recovering the passion and trust of their courting days.

It may not come as a surprise, given the above, that “Plucking the Apple” ends equivocally. There are no happy reconciliations; Ellen alone receives good news at the novel’s close, learning that she may finally be able to embark on a career commensurate with her abilities.

Palmer doesn’t tie together the novel’s many loose ends with much conviction or elegance, but it’s only fair that she provides Ellen, the book’s one attractive character, with a promising future. Ellen is described at one point as a “born muse”--indeed, she inspires superior creative work, following lovemaking, in two characters--but until the novel’s conclusion she is far too busy taking care of her husband and children and their home lives to be able to determine whether she might be an artist in her own right.

There’s a feminist heart beating in this book, but Palmer, wisely, doesn’t let it stop her from ridiculing equally the parties on either side of the battle of the sexes. Feel free to give “Plucking the Apple” to fans of Fay Weldon, and to men as well as women--but on no account to a couple heading off on their honeymoon.