No Place for Children

CASTLE UGLY by Mary Ellin Barrett. 255 pages. E. P. Dutton. $4.95.

In that time before the war, no beatniks cluttered the village greens, no motels crammed the long, empty spaces between the grotesque Victorian "cottages." The houses along the lonely beaches on Long Island's aristocratic tip were inhabited by "seemingly enchanted people who lived untouched by the Depression." To them, gaiety was an art, gossip passed for conversation, and risk sports served as discipline. Just inshore from the thudding surf, they busied themselves with a series of interlinked liaisons that would boggle the imagination of an Iris Murdoch. It was, perhaps, no place for children; adults thought the children were aware only of the surf.

Young Sarah Courtland was eleven that summer. With trouble in the house, eleven is a hard time. Children like Sarah are spectators at a contest, but they discover that they are also part of the spoils -- never the main prize, but the consolation prize.

Sarah's father was everybody's friend, never missed a party, played a lively jazz guitar, and drank. Her mother was dark, beautiful, and "seemed to live as if she had a splinter of ice in her heart." Novelist Barrett has a fine ear for the edged remarks that are designed ostensibly to pass over the head of a child but really aimed as by-blows in the battle for the child's fealty. From father (comforting his daughter after a nightmare): "Your mother doesn't have nightmares when she's asleep, only when she's awake." From mother (when Sarah has mumps and wants her father): "Your father is particularly anxious not to get the mumps. It might really cramp his style."

The trouble in the house proves to be not single but multiple, and it is all wound up with the gothic flourish of an ambiguous murder. The prose in this first novel by Mary Ellin Barrett, daughter of Composer Irving Berlin, sometimes rises a little too high on its toes and ends up breathless. But the book is saved from the Venus flytrap of ladies' magazine fiction by its easy intimacy with the ambiance of those days of picnic baskets and tennis flannels. The author has a sophisticated sense of the tensions that show among even the most beautiful people -- like the stringy neck muscles beneath an aging face that has been given too much expensive care.

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