Edition: U.S. / Global


By Michiko Kakutani
Published: March 25, 1987

THE MISALLIANCE. By Anita Brookner. 191 pages. Pantheon Books. $14.95.

AT first, Anita Brookner's latest heroine, Blanche Vernon, would seem to have nothing whatsoever in common with her famous namesake in ''A Streetcar Named Desire'': she has none of Blanche DuBois's ravaged sensuality, none of her dark secrets to conceal. Rather, Miss Brookner's Blanche - one of those terribly proper women who have led careful, decorous lives - is a woman routinely commended and condemned for her ''docility,'' her ''seriousness'' and her ''goodness.''

What the two Blanches share is an emotional neediness and a capacity for victimization - both look to men for salvation; both stand as symbols of vanished, anachronistic cultures, and both are attracted to the very harsh, vulgar reality that threatens to destroy them.

Certainly ''The Misalliance'' neither aspires to - nor comes close to achieving - the tragic stature of ''Streetcar.'' Like Miss Brookner's earlier works, it's a small, immaculately orchestrated novel, set down in precise, unforgiving prose. It, too, offers another variation on the author's favorite theme: the race, in life, between the tortoises and the hares -the plodding innocents and the careless sophisticates, the earnest do-gooders and the unscrupulous users. As in ''Look at Me,'' the heroine - a decided tortoise, if there ever was one - is mesmerized by the hectic world of the hares, and her attempts to observe and even enter into their games will very nearly destroy her. This time, however, the experience will also jar her into self-awareness, and in doing so, will hold out the promise of starting over.

The interplay between innocence and sophistication, of course, has long been a favorite topic of novelists -from Choderlos de Laclos, the author of ''Les Liaisons Dangereuses,'' who used it to examine the cynicism of the aristocracy in the declining years of the ancien regime, to Henry James, who used it to look at the relationship between America and Europe. Though her novel reverberates with echoes of such books, Miss Brookner's aims, again, are considerably more modest: she simply wants to use the dichotomy as an explanation for the fact that some women are more successful than others in the departments of sex and romance.

As Blanche sees it, there are two kinds of women: women like herself who are calm, sincere, doting and honest in their dealing with men; and women like Mousie - her husband's mistress - who are sly, petulant, manipulative and demanding. In the end, she argues, the Mousies of the world are the ones, who get the man; she, herself, is destined ''to be the loser.''

Although her husband, Bertie, abruptly walks out on her after 20 years of marriage, Blanche feels no rancor toward him. ''She looked on him,'' writes Miss Brookner, ''as she had always looked on him, as a kind of gigantic treat, a prize won in a lottery, something fortunate and undeserved, and, because undeserved, all the more pleasurable. She even understood his defection, for he was a restless man and she had always dreaded boring him.'' Now happily settled with Mousie, Bertie occasionally drops by to see Blanche, and Blanche awaits these visits with the expectation and longing of a girl waiting for a call from her beau.

At times, this sort of passivity and self-pitying resignation come close to turning Blanche into a pathetic figure. Why can't she tell Bertie off, we wonder with growing irritation. And why does she continue to welcome him into her life - forcing herself to listen, masochistically, to recitations of his plans with Mousie? And yet, such is Miss Brookner's dexterity in handling emotional and social details that we are gradually converted to Blanche's viewpoint - experiencing, with her, the hurt and loneliness of her new post-Bertie life.

As it quickly becomes clear, it's an unusually attenuated existence. Independently wealthy, Blanche has no job, no obligations; she passes the time, or tries to, by visiting museums, doing volunteer work and chatting with her housekeeper. Then, one day, during a visit to the local hospital, Blanche meets a perky young woman named Sally Beamish and Sally's baby daughter, Nellie. For some reason, Nellie refuses to speak, and her willful muteness and melancholy demeanor trigger a sympathetic response in Blanche. She befriends the child and mother, offers them money and assistance, and involves herself more and more in their messy affairs.

Sally, it seems, has led the sort of wild and extravagant life - full of parties, travels and adventures - undreamed of by Blanche; and her absent husband appears to be involved in some shady business deal with a vaguely menacing couple abroad. Only when a compromising favor is asked of Blanche does she begin to realize that her fascination with the Beamishes' world - and her discreet voyeurism - may in fact constitute a terrible ''misalliance,'' that there may be damaging consequences all around.

Much of this will be overly familiar to readers of Miss Brookner's five previous novels. In fact, much of ''The Misalliance'' finds Blanche blurring into a pretty, if undistinguished, amalgam of such previous Brookner heroines as Frances in ''Look at Me,'' Kitty in ''Providence'' and Edith in ''Hotel du Lac.'' What is different about Blanche is supplied by this volume's startling - and expertly rendered - conclusion. It points to a new and altogether welcome turn in Miss Brookner's career, away from the bitterness of her last novel (''Family and Friends''), toward something just a little brighter: the promise of new life, and redemption.

Photo of Anita Brookner (Jerry Bauer)