Books: No Fizz

THE FOOLISH GENTLEWOMAN (330 pp.) —Margery Sharp—Little, Brown ($3).

Margery Sharp has a sharp eye. But it takes more than that to be a really good writer. In her slight, pleasant novels (The Nutmeg Tree, Cluny Brown) she has neatly observed the small, telling details of social manners that weightier novelists often pass by. Her special gift is sketching, snippily but without too much malice, the idiosyncratic types that seem still to populate the English countryside as in the days of Jane Austen. (This gift has paid off well; three of her novels have...