For this is not an ironic parody a la Barth, not an echo of Eco, but a genuine reproduction of a full-bodied 19th-century page-turner of a novel, set in late Regency England, thick with characters of all classes, with plots, counterplots, forebodings, reversals and interpolated tales. ''The Quincunx'' deserves the hoopla it's an astonishing imitation, a Borgesian feat of sustained imaginative anachronism, the fictional equivalent of Colonial Williamsburg.

What the Dickens! - with a little Thackeray and Wilkie Collins tossed in for spice.

From these ragged beginnings, ''The Quincunx'' has risen to riches and ended happily, a main selection of the Literary Guild. He then sold his novel for a mere $900 to a small Edinburgh publishing firm, which had to send a motorbike all the way down to London to hand-deliver the manuscript in time to be considered (though unsuccessfully) for the Booker Prize. Now, we have the story of ''The Quincunx.'' Charles Palliser (his name already Trollopean), a lecturer at a Glasgow university, worked on a mammoth (over 500,000 words long) Victorian novel for 12 painstaking years (16, by the time the story reached Liz Smith's column). And Ladies of the Club'' (because of the author's age) are examples. The hoopla surrounding John Kennedy Toole's ''Confederacy of Dunces'' (because of the author's suicide) and Helen Hooven Santmyer's ''. The book business so loves to celebrate the sudden fame of those it has long neglected that the publication history of a Cinderella novel becomes in itself a news event.

The quincunx palliser