White-Collar Faust

THE SECOND FACE (182 pp.)--Marcel Ayme--Harper ($2.50).

Until one fateful afternoon, Raoui Cerusier was just another middle-aged Frenchman. He was crowding 40, the owner of a broad, flat, commonplace face; full-blooded but rather proud of the fact that, give or take a little, he had always been true to his wife, a devoted father, and a hard worker at his lead business. Then, of a sudden, pretty women who had never wasted a glance on Raoul Cerusier began to look at him with every sign of intense interest. Without his having felt so much as a twitch, Raoul's face had suddenly changed into a handsome, sensitive one--the face of a man of 30.

At this point, strangers to the novels of Marcel Ayme may very well decide that he is merely setting the stage for slapstick. But as readers of The Barkeep of Element and The Miraculous Barber have reason to know, Author Ayme is one of the most formidable ironists alive. He takes Lead Merchant Cerusier for a quicksilver ride among such big questions as: How much of life is essence and how much appearance? Is a man what he looks to be?

Hardheaded Raoul realizes that by one stroke he has lost wife, children, job, friends, everything dear (and respectable) in his life: if he announces that he is Cerusier, he will wind up in a straitjacket. Simple enough to hire himself back into his business--but how to get back his wife and family? The only honest thing to do, he decides, is to seduce his own wife.

The scene in which Cerusier cuckolds himself, and can't decide whether to feel like a smug seducer or an outraged husband, is a very funny one. But there is more than comedy here. Cerusier sees in his wife that afternoon "a woman transformed . . . awakened for the first time," and he feels the same awakening in himself. But he cannot escape "a state of curious despair ... I had seen my place empty under the sun, and I had a feeling that it was always so." He finds that his resistance to sexual temptation, of which he has been proud, was really nothing to brag about, after all--"The truth was that nothing had been offered me." The role of a white-collar Faust, in short, had its drawbacks.

Yet the minute he gets his old face back, Cerusier wails like a man who has fumbled a fortune. "God . . . offered me a way out . . . but not for an instant had I risen to the occasion. I had thought of nothing except to get back to ... my former life." And he is not above riding it high & mighty over his erring wife. Ridiculous, ordinary, but very human, little Cerusier is one of the richest literary creations of the year.

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