`SPANISH LOVER' RICH IN MIDDLEBROW APPEAL.

Byline: Fernando Gonzalez Knight-Ridder Tribune News Wire

Title: ``A Spanish Lover''

Author: Joanna Trollope 

Data: 336 pages, Random House; $23

Our rating: Three Stars

It takes skill to make the banal compelling, and there is a fascinating middle-class ordinariness to the characters in English novelist Joanna Trollope's eminently readable ``A Spanish Lover.''

Set in contemporary England, it follows a year in the lives of twin sisters Lizzie and Frances Shore, 38, and ``two pieces of a jigsaw.'' Lizzie is married and has four children, a model husband, a dream house and a thriving arts-and-crafts gallery. She is success personified.

Frances is single and has stumbled in business and personal relationships.

Their roles are well defined and long settled. That order and that acceptance, in fact, are the glue that holds the twins' universe together.

On a business trip in the south of Spain, Frances, who is slowly developing a modestly successful travel agency, falls for a married Spaniard. Senor Luis Gomez Moreno is Catholic and a traditionalist. It is clear that he will never divorce his wife, but under his attention, Frances nonetheless blossoms with affirmation and fulfillment. As she does, the people around her begin to spin out of their predictable orbits.

Lizzie's business is almost crushed by a financial crisis, an allusion to the devastating effects of Thatcherite economic policies. She loses her house and has to take a menial job. Suddenly, cool, loving, reliable Lizzie comes unhinged, raging against the rules she once embraced and the rewards she thought she wanted. She is not alone. As everyone in the family watches Frances with a mix of disapproval and envy, each begins to question his or her own standards of happiness and courage. The twins' mother, Barbara, a dour proto-feminist, comes up against a lifetime of inconsistencies. William, her husband, faces the consequences of deciding by not deciding, and Juliet, William's longstanding mistress and by now a member of the family, takes a hard look at her blurry fantasies.

Trollope, a descendant of 19th-century novelist Anthony Trollope, pulls all this off with casual grace. Her fourth novel set in contemporary times, ``A Spanish Lover'' was a 1993 best seller in England. She also has written seven historical novels and ``Britannia's Daughters,'' a history.

Trollope has a reporter's eye for detail and a great ear for language. Gomez Moreno's English has the stiff rhythms and awkward constructions of a learned, rather than lived-in, language: `` `Listen,' he said, leaning forward, his dark eyes shining, `listen Frances, I want to know you. I have never talked to a woman in this way, I have never felt I was so much - in a mystery, and then I come a little close and you hide from me. Why always? What are you afraid of?' ''

She also tempers realism with some prim trimmings - curious choices of words, such as ``a disagreeable tree,'' and observant, fussed-over descriptions of Spain and English life - and gauzy, romance-novel settings. No wonder some British critics have dismissed her as the Martha Stewart of fiction.

The scripted routines of daily life, the details of housekeeping, the modest, hopeful insights all have a depressingly familiar feel. Even the wild cards - such as ``senor'' Gomez Moreno, inevitably dark-eyed, suave, passionate, formal but gallant - have a comfortable fit, never far from cliche.

The tension here comes from the larger themes at the heart of Trollope's story: the prices we pay for continuity and change in our lives, the small but profound personal costs of changes in economic policies, the promises and limits of feminism.

These are difficult issues bound to raise rather impolite questions. But Trollope deploys them like well-trained servants, always nearby, always available to help keep things moving but never to be noticed. And it works. To her credit, she doesn't suggest there are easy answers, or, as is the case here, tidy resolutions.

``A Spanish Lover'' is well-crafted, middlebrow entertainment, easy on the mind but with just enough substance to hold a spine. It is also a skillful update on a proven formula. Think of a Jane Austen of the '90s, writing for the supermarket rack.

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Photo: With ``A Spanish Lover,'' Joanna Trollope presents a skillful update on a proven formula. Her fourth novel set in contemporary times, it was a 1993 best seller in England.

Knight-Ridder Tribune Photo Service