Many-Tentacled Evasions

PORTRAIT OF A MAN UNKNOWN (223 pp.) -- Nathalie Sarraute -- Brazil Braziller ($3.50).

At first glance, France's acclaimed Nathalie Sarraute (56) writes like a woman who has lost her novelist's wits. Her characters are anonymous, shadowlike creatures who seem to take turns living first in feverish madness, then in tiresome mediocrity. They know each other, but what binds them together is neither friendship nor love but a mixture of sickly attraction and grisly revulsion. Jean Paul Sartre, contributing an enthusiastic forward, explains: "If we take a look at what goes on inside people, we glimpse a moiling of flabby, many-tentacled evasions . . . Roll away the stone of the commonplace and we find running discharges, slobberings, mucous; hesitant amoeba-like movements. [Nathalie Sarraute's] vocabulary is incomparably rich in suggesting the slow, centrifugal creeping of these viscous, live solutions."

Compulsive Eye. The hero of Portrait of a Man Unknown is a potbellied Frenchman, no longer young, who seems to live with his aging parents. That is about all the reader ever finds out about him. Most of his time seems to be spent in checking up on the activities of an old maid and her father. Both father and daughter were born under the sign of French avarice. The girl whines and begs for money, the father accuses her of hoarding what he gives her. One night he dashes barefoot and in his nightgown into the kitchen, climbs a chair and looks at the bar of soap on a high shelf. No doubt about it, "she had cut off a large piece, almost a good third." So now he had her --"like the butter last year, and the shoe polish ..."

Like a compulsive private eye, the hero avidly watches over the years as father and daughter become almost subhuman in their batterings at each other's dignity and sense of decency. What drives him is a need to break through the outer shells of people and look through to the frightening inner swamps of fear and desperation. What he finds in himself is a weak schizophrenic who sees the world and normal people masked against him. Spying on his own inner self, or on the girl and her father, becomes more important to him than anything that can happen in the workaday world, which in any case he thinks is a fraud. The girl is not unlike him: "She picks up the scent of things people are ashamed of; she sniffs at implied meanings, follows through the traces of hidden humiliations, unable to break away from them."

New Realists. Madame Sarraute, the Russian-born wife of a Paris lawyer, has been acclaimed a leader of a group called the New Realists, who urge a new kind of objectivity, which is at once both more detached and more intense. "In this future universe of the novel," says Novelist Alain Robbe-Grillet, the group's titular leader, "gestures and objects will be 'there,' before being 'something'; and they will still be there afterwards, hard, unalterable, eternally present, mocking their own meaning . . . No longer will objects be merely vague reflections of the hero's vague soul."

Certainly Portrait exercises its own crawly fascination, the same fascination that accompanies a tour through a hospital for the insane. In a bold afterpiece to the main show, Author Sarraute shows the hero, all but normal, the girl stylishly dressed and made up, with her solid fiance beside her planning their new home, the old father relaxed and pleased at the way things are going. Such is the strange spell of Portrait of a Man Unknown that this familiar, commonplace scene takes on the shape of madness, and what has gone before seems to have been normal.

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