Love Set

THE RED ROOM (247 pp.)--Franc,oise Mallet-Joris--Farrar, Straus & Cudahy ($3.50).

L'amour is the French national game, and the French novel is a handbook and guide to its fine points. These are at least as intricate as the fine points of, say, lawn tennis, though perhaps not quite as wholesome. One of the most elegant sportswriters of L'amour is a 26-year-old Flemish-born Parisian housewife and mother named Franc,oise Mallet-Joris. In

The Illusionist (TIME, Oct. 13, 1952) she told the strange story of a 15-year-old girl who fell in love with her father's mistress.

In The Red Room she picks up the same characters two years later for the second set of this oddly played love match.

At the end of The Illusionist, the novel's red-headed heroine Helene Noris is defeated when Papa Noris marries her Lesbian seductress Tamara in an effort to still the village gossips. As The Red Room begins, the trio is still under the same roof in the same Flemish provincial town, but the passion between the two women has cooled into ashes of distaste.

The ashes are stirred by Jean Delfau, a wealthy set designer who has come from Paris to help Papa Noris put a little theatrical glamour into his mayoralty campaign. Tamara promptly puts her overripe charms at Jean's disposal, and Helene just as promptly decides to steal Jean from her simply for revenge.

She does, but her spitfire independence ("Do not let me bend my head, O God, ever") turns their love affair into a contest of wills. Jean is an urbane Don Juan, and Helene wants to scratch her initials in his hide so deeply that they will never heal. Yet even as their love grows in intensity and understanding, they are not above betraying each other with other lovers.

What keeps The Red Room from becoming a sexual saturnalia is that it traces the contours of the heart as well as the flesh. Colette-like in its rhythms, Author Mallet-Joris' prose moves in sensuous counterpoint between "beauty, cruelty, voluptuousness and suffering, all equally delicious." What is not delicious about Helene and what finally destroys her relationship with Jean is her feral determination to belong only to herself. Outwardly unmarred but inwardly depraved, she is a female Dorian Gray. But even with an unbeautiful soul, the game of love is scarcely over at 18, and with her penchant for sequels, Author Mallet-Joris may yet salvage Helene in time to win some future match.

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