Pot-Boyler

AVALANCHE -- /Co/ Boyle -- Simon & Schuster ($2.50).

Kay Boyle has sold the Left Bank down the river. For some 20 years a per sistent expatriate, Minnesota-born Novel ist Boyle is the author of Gentlemen, I Address You Privately, Plagued by the Nightingale and eleven other volumes about complex, erratic and usually perverse characters. Author Boyle's writing has been called "obscure," "elliptical," "addled," "sinewy," and possessed of a "cold greenish brilliance."

None of these adjectives fits a single line of Avalanche. Written as a Sateve post serial, it is spectacular melodrama, sometimes tautened into Hitchcocky thrills. Its setting: the Alps at the point where France, Switzerland, Italy meet. Its heroine: U.S.-born, French-raised Fenton Ravel, who visits Unoccupied France to find her French lover, Bastineau.

But in the lonely Alpine village the French mountaineers had ceased to speak of Bastineau. Some said he was "missing," some said he was dead. The cold, sphinxlike stranger with a dueling scar on his cheek (he said he was Swiss, called him self de Vaudois) was also curious about Bastineau. He wondered why so many peasants were knitting mittens with an identical, peculiar pattern; why peasants came from miles around to lay food on a lonely mountain shrine; why the old cure's sermons were almost unintelligible to strangers. Whenever Fenton started up the mountains in search of Bastineau, she found de Vaudois at her heels.

One day in a mountain hut he confronted Fenton triumphantly, explained that it was all an anti-Nazi plot. Escaping Axis prisoners were given the mittens be cause the curious pattern was a map. The food at the shrine was for Bastineau. The cure's cryptic sermons kept the villagers informed of anti-Nazi activities. De Vaudois tied Fenton's arms with a rope, began to lead her to Gestapo headquarters. Suddenly a "wondrous and loud and wild" whoopee sounded above their heads. "Eas ily, gracefully as a jumper on skis, Bastineau came down the chimney's broad, wooden shaft, his arms spread like a diver's, his eyes and teeth pure white and savage in his face." His heel snapped de Vaudois's wrist with a crack, his hand snatched a pistol, pumped bullets through the Nazi's heart. "So--vengeance," he snarled. Old Cousin Perrin shuffled in with food for the lovers. "The goat cheese is fresh," he observed, pulling the corpse into the passage. "This is just the beginning for all of us," said the cure, thumbing the marriage service. "My wife!" cried Bastineau.

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