Toujours la Tristesse

A CERTAIN SMILE (128 pp.)--Franc,oise Sagan--Dutton ($2.95).

A favorite pose of the very young is to abandon hope because they still have so much. One of the best-paid literary practitioners of this kind of premature despair is Paris' intellectual gamin, Franc,oise Sagan, just turned 21. As readers who pushed the sales of Bonjour Tristesse past the million mark know, Sagan wears her world-weary rue with a spicy difference. In her novels, sin triumphs over everything but syntax. This high-styled amorality led one French critic to sum up her work as "classicism in panties."

Author Sagan is all set to repeat her success with A Certain Smile. More than 200,000 copies have been sold in France, and the U.S. publisher had 100,000 in print before publication. In Bonjour Tristesse, the teen-age heroine lived on cozy terms with her widowed father's succession of mistresses until he proposed to marry one, at which point the daughter showed her claws and drove the poor woman to suicide. A Certain Smile is only slightly less scandalous, and similarly concerned with Author Sagan's thirst for drinking at the fountain of eternal middle age. This time the heroine ditches her schoolmate lover for an illicit affair with his married uncle.

Oasis on the Riviera. Dominique, the heroine, is a law student, but essentially a kind of sophisticated Gallic equivalent of a rock-'n'-roller. She smokes incessantly, drinks Scotch methodically and goes to bebop dances at a nightclub called the "Kentucky."' Much of the time she is "bored passionately," and her casual, completely physical love affair with Bertrand, a fellow student, rarely takes the edge off that boredom. Then Bertrand introduces her to his uncle Luc and Dominique decides hopefully: "He's just the kind that seduces little girls like me."

Luc is somewhat spavined and haggard, a kind of walking ruin of a roue, and, of course, old enough to be Dominique's father. What makes their liaison inevitable is that they both fear the binding emotions of real love like a plague and hence, in Author Sagan's Sartrian thinking, respect each other's freedom. Both cherish isolated moments of intense sensation, encountered rather like chance oases in the desert journey of what they regard as life's everyday meaninglessness. After one passionate week on the Riviera stretches into two, Dominique finds that she cannot hand Luc back to his wife in quite the airy way in which she took him. But Luc has not fallen in love, and before novel's end, Dominique has to do the penance she has always detested--the waits by the telephone that doesn't ring, the anguished, banal begging ("I can't live without you") and the ever-present taste of ashes that even whisky will not wash away.

Plenty of Nothing. Author Sagan's prose is as disciplined as her characters are not. Her style is spare, lucid and psychologically astute. Yet her novel is a petition in spiritual and emotional bankruptcy. The word "nothing" recurs with obsessive frequency in describing what the heroine thinks and feels. Hemingway reduced the value problem of his "lost generation" to "What is moral is what you feel good after." Sagan has reduced hers to "What you feel is good, if you feel anything." Even the heroine's parting smile precedes a somewhat rueful summing up: "Well, what did it matter? I was a woman who had loved a man. It was a simple story." Being sad and wise and a little tired of it all in this continental way has a certain wayward charm. It seems to appeal so strongly to Franc,oise Sagan that she may never get around to striking any other pose.

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