Good Hand JACK OF DIAMONDS

By R.Z. Sheppard

Elizabeth Spencer is often compared to another Mississippi-born writer, Eudora Welty. Sometimes Spencer's name is even mentioned in the same critical breath with Henry James. The comparisons are flattering, but to be measured against some of the best usually means never measuring up. Cold comfort then for Spencer, especially since so many writers today are overpraised on a narrower scale of accomplishment.

The author's best-known work of fiction is the novel The Light in the Piazza (1960), in which an American mother takes her beautiful retarded daughter to Florence. There the girl is wooed and eventually wed by a local boy. As a bastion of faith, culture and family traditions, that city seems a good place for a helpless young woman, and an evocative locale for a writer.

Italy, of course, is a favored setting of English and American fiction in which innocents abroad are stirred by art and sensuality. Spencer continues to use the convention effectively. The Cousins, a story in her newest collection, Jack of Diamonds, could be titled Maidenhead Revisited. Ella Mason, 50 and recently widowed, returns to Florence, where she and her hometown cousins from Martinsville, Ala., enjoyed a summer's frolic 30 years ago. One of them, Eric, now lives in Italy, and through a pleating of conversations and memories, Spencer reveals a complexity of attitudes and relationships. Not the least of them expands the definition of the down-home term kissin' cousins.

All five stories reveal a highly developed sense of time, place and filial bonds. An apparent mismatch between an English-speaking woman and a French- speaking man in Montreal suggests the dissociations of Quebec life. The Business Venture is set in Mississippi and strikes a similar note through the unlikely partnership of a white woman and a black man in a dry-cleaning service.

Spencer's sociology and cosmopolitan tastes are not obvious. Geography, class and manners are surfaces that refract the deeper feelings and emerging awarenesses of her characters. Some are confronted with familiar situations. The young woman in the title story learns the truth about her parents' marriage after her mother dies and her father's new wife tactfully but deliberately eliminates traces of her predecessor. The plot of The Skaters is complicated and, yes, Jamesian: a disinherited son is helped by his lawyer's wife, whose lover steals the original copy of the damaging will. Spencer is dispassionate about domestic morality but intensely curious about the things people do, the lies they live and the truths they hide. Her stories are graceful, solidly crafted and honest. To say more would be a disservice to her talent and integrity.-- R.Z.S.