Twilight by the Danube

THE HOUSE IN VIENNA (244 pp.)--Edith de Born--Knopf ($3.95).

Aristocracy, like fine cheese, is usually at its most interesting in an advanced state of decay. Chekhov demonstrated this in prerevolutionary Russia, William Faulkner in post-Civil War America. Theoretically the decline of the Austro-Hungarian nobility before and after World War I ought to make equally pungent fiction. Unfortunately this is only sometimes the case in Author de Born's new novel, the second installment of a trilogy (the first, Felding Castle, published early last year, was set in 1900 and carried a nostalgic remembrance of that time of sunlit lawns, masquerade balls and respectful peasants).

The new heroine is Baroness Milli von Kailern, 23, unmarried and disenchanted with life in the Socialist, poverty-stricken Vienna of 1926. When her love for stuffy Prince Wieland Traun is rebuffed, Milli despairingly gives herself to another young man, in what may well be the most tepidly described seduction in contemporary literature: "One day in their flat, when his mother was out for a couple of hours only, he began to undress me . . . That I was a virgin surprised him."

The Von Kailern family mansion (the former palace of an archbishop) is overrun by a plague of sponging Croatian relatives; Milli's gentle father fitfully writes his futile memoirs; her dashing brother Karli spends his nights gambling, his days wooing nouveau riche heiresses. Milli drifts moodily through her days, hears people talking about a man named (she thinks) Albert Hitler, beats her head against the prison walls of faded gentility, and makes vague, hopelessly unrealistic plans to work in a hotel or a tourist agency. Rescue finally comes when an aunt who has married a U.S. millionaire sweeps into Vienna, vaguely trying to conquer her own past, and sweeps Milli off to New York.

Author Edith de Born, fiftyish, is herself Viennese, lives in Belgium as the wife of a French banker. She writes in a rather stiff English that never conveys the cozy, weary sloppiness of Viennese upper-class slang. And many cliches of her adopted language apparently still strike her as fresh; too often her characters "champ at the bit" or find troubles weighing on them "like a millstone." To Author de Born's credit, her characterization is not nearly so cliche-ridden as her language. The sad pleasures of between-wars Vienna, the long afternoons of penurious idleness, the twilight of great houses, are evocatively done. But many readers may wish that the novel dealt more fully with swashbuckling brother Karli, who at least attempts to fight his way out of stagnation, and less with Sister Milli, who does little except to complain about those millstones.

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