At the risk of sounding, well, sexist, I'll say up front that men haven't quite mastered the sex-and-shopping novel. Not that A Much Married Man is strictly sex-and-shopping, mind you; Nicholas Coleridge, a Brit, has substituted lots of manor-style interior decorating for the shopping part. The title character, one Anthony John Fenwick Anscombe, heir to an Elizabethan estate in Oxfordshire, marries a succession of inappropriate women before figuring it all out. Alas, the beleaguered, oft-besotted Anthony is far more interesting than his wives, who almost never come alive on the page (unless it's to whine or demand). Still, this spectacle, playing out in the moldy enclaves of the nobility, manages to charm in a peculiarly British fashion. B–