Books: Elsa Undone

WORDS OF ADVICE

by Fay Weldon

Random House. 215 pages. $7.95

This mannered little comedy of bedroom hanky-panky aspires after wickedness—the word Nabokovian is used wistfully in the dust-jacket copy—and achieves naughtiness instead. But that is enough to sustain Author Fay Weldon's fifth novel, one of those lazy summer afternoon collusions in which the writer feels superior to her characters, and the reader smiles at the writer.

Victor is a 44-year-old antique dealer, newly escaped from a dull marriage and a dull office job. Elsa is 19 and his mistress. "A year ago, when...