Bicycle Race

ESCAPE IN PASSION (589 pp.)--Jules Romains (Translafed by Gerard Hopkins)--Knopf ($3.50).

Of the world's great fiction traditions none is hardier than the encyclopedic chronicle of French national life. Honore de Balzac's La Comedie Humaine was a procession of some 90 stories. Then came Emile Zola's 20-volume series of novels, Les Rougon-Macquart. Now Jules Romains' Men of Good Will, a study of French history and habits between 1908 and 1933, has reached its 13th and penultimate volume.

Escape in Passion, like its predecessors, is a novel with a vast and varied cast. Its 400-odd characters -- including an orphan boy, an electrician, an absconding millionaire, an actress, a smattering of Cabinet ministers--have one notable advantage over Balzac's and Zola's 19th Century people: Romains' travel by air.

When things get too stuffy, this modern chronicler has only to shift his scene from Paris to Warsaw, London to Budapest, from the back room, of a leather-goods shop to the cockpit of a speeding plane. And as if the wonders of the Air Age were not enough, Author Romains has a fine eye for the contemporary intimacy of sex and politics.

Yet despite these racy blessings, the novel is dull going. Diligently describing the European stew in Hitler's first year, whole pages are devoted to such passages as this: "In every issue touching monetary policy, disarmament, and the consolidation of world peace, it appears that Great Britain ... is less and less willing to take any step except with the full agreement of the United States. ... I find myself in complete agreement with Great Britain."

Weighed down by international depression and their own heavy thinking, Chronicler Romains' characters literally escape into passion. Some seek normal love, others prefer perversion. Result (in the English translation): to make his novel safe for U.S. family readers, Romains says he has felt obliged to make "completely brutal excisions." The deletions are certain to stimulate readers' imaginations. Example: "If you like, I'll sit at the piano (three words deleted)."

Even with some of their most private thoughts blue-penciled, Escape in Passion's characters will probably seem alive to the devoted few who have followed their progress since 1932. Most newcomers to Romains' encyclopedic study will experience the puzzlement of a pedestrian who suddenly sees the muddy, sweaty finalists pant past in the last stages of a transcontinental bicycle race. He has no idea of where they are pedaling to, no conception of the vigor and dash with which they began the contest. Nonetheless, he feels an instinctive desire to cheer --if only because he can see that they have come a long way in bad weather.

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