BOOK REVIEW / NOVEL : Into Their Lives a Count Like No Other : ON THE WAY TO THE VENUS DE MILO <i> by Pearson Marx</i> ; Simon and Schuster $21, 270 pages

At first, the road to the Venus de Milo seems to be paved with comedy all the way from Manhattan to Paris.

When Estelle Wolfe, widowed for 12 years, opens a letter from a man with the risible name of Dr. Count Francesco von Cockleburg, she immediately invites him to dinner at her Fifth Avenue apartment.

Estelle has two daughters: Lisanne, a free spirit currently working as a masseuse in Florida, and Ellen, married to a blustering lout and living in New York.

Available on short notice, Ellen is waiting with her mother for their unknown guest’s arrival when von Cockleburg stumbles in, cut and bleeding, his purple velvet dinner jacket and trousers showing definite signs of a recent struggle.

The noble scholar, athlete, poet and martial artist, “yearning for verdure,” had ridden his bicycle through Central Park, where he was set upon by adolescent thugs who dismantled his bike after beating him with sticks, a mishap von Cockleburg describes as if it were an Elizabethan tragedy.

“Ah, the cloacal city. I am not used to its ways.” Though his vocabulary seems to come directly from Roget’s Thesaurus, the accent is restaurant French with a definite Germanic edge. His speech is liberally salted with literary quotations, which he obligingly footnotes for his less erudite listeners.

At this point and for a hundred pages following, the Dr. Count, drawn in broad strokes, remains a comic character of a kind seldom encountered in contemporary fiction. Estelle Wolfe herself seems meant to be a figure of fun; a woman who keeps a dozen stray mutts in her elegant duplex and polishes off three bottles of wine in an evening.

It’s hard to feel anything but disdain (and perhaps a twinge of pity) for Ellen, married to a bigoted, world-class bore, and the mother of an obnoxious son who seems cloned, rather than merely descended, from his father.

Though Lisanne is endearing, in a 1970s scatterbrained way, we’re not encouraged to take her too seriously either.

Given the absurdly pompous Dr. Count von Cockleburg, the warm-hearted but definitely naive Estelle, smug Ellen with her awful husband, Donald Patrick Prawl, and sweet but flaky Lisanne, it seems only natural to expect a farce.

In a logical universe, these elements would indicate that a phony count is courting a wealthy widow in order to bilk her.

We have every right to assume that he will eventually be unmasked by a coalition of the daughters and son-in-law.

We can only hope that Estelle will come to her senses in time. No other ending seems possible under the circumstances.

Estelle invites the count to her summer home in the country, where they are joined by both Prawls, their obstreperous son Li’l Donald, and Lisanne, who has been summoned north by her frantic sister. Shortly after the house party is assembled, von Cockleburg is shot in the buttocks by a BB gun, an incident more ridiculous than hilarious.

Out there in the boondocks of Westchester County, the household is further enlarged by an eavesdropping cook, Mrs. Nipe, and an almost-too-good-to-be-true young man whom Estelle has hired to take care of the grounds. His name is Adair, and he appears to be ideal for Lisanne.

By the end of the novel and the predictable courtship, Lisanne and Adair are blissfully married and honeymooning in Paris. Before that is permitted to happen, the count mysteriously disappears, Estelle’s grotesque English sister-in-law arrives to provide more distraction, and matters grow increasingly confused.

The ultimate effect is curiously quaint, rather like those creaky English comedies in which people wander in and out saying, “Tennis, anyone?” Bits of pathos are introduced seemingly at random, points of view are switched without warning, and readers, sadder but no wiser, eventually realize why the comic novel has become an endangered literary species.