An Affair of the Heart

THE CHATEAU (401 pp.)--William Maxwell--Knopf ($4.95).

This precise, intelligent and slightly bloodless book is essentially a novel of sensibility on the classic Jamesian theme of American innocence and European experience. Its internal drama--dramatically understated--is a victory and defeat of the heart: the love of an American couple for France and their frustrated yearnings to be loved in return by some French people they get to know.

Harold and Barbara Rhodes are gentle, guileless, upper middle class and upper middlebrow. He is 34, she is 27, and their only sadness is a slightly self-conscious chagrin at not having had a child. The France they visit in 1948 is still digging its way out of rubble and through ration books, still bitterly preoccupied with sour memories of the war and occupation years. The Rhodeses are the kind of Americans who think them selves a cut above Americans, other American tourists at any rate. To get beyond the brief cultural encounters of hotels, museums and sightseeing tours, they arrange to spend two weeks at the Chateau Beaumesnil, a lyth century country house 100 miles or so outside Paris.

Lukewarm Linguistics. Mme. Vienot, the proprietress of the chateau, belongs to an aristocratic clan that has seen richer days, though the Rhodeses do not immediately know that. Their room is pleasant, though not quite as advertised--there is no hot water, and when Barbara complains, a maid appears at odd hours with lukewarm basins. The Rhodeses find the countryside charming, but the people seem unaccountably chilly. Mme. Vienot is brisk, cheerless and not above padding a bill. Her aged mother sits through most of dinner in a glazed reverie. A millionaire guest tells the Rhodeses how much he enjoyed eating "ut doaks" in the U.S. Barbara laughs irrepressibly when she realizes he is saying hot dogs, and the rich man turns frigid. Linguistic laggards themselves, the Rhodeses nonetheless know enough French to sense barbed undercurrents in the conversational flow.

After one such evening, Harold asks Barbara, "Do I imagine it or is it true that when they speak of the Nazis--the very next sentence is invariably some quite disconnected remark about Americans?"

Manners prove as disconcerting as malice; the Rhodeses retreat from a few encounters bruised and mystified. Author Maxwell resolves some of these mysteries in an old-fashioned epilogue that chiefly confirms one of the implicit themes of the book: that every cultural contact is something of a cultural clash.

In Harold's Teeth. A New Yorker editor for the past 25 years, William Maxwell, 52, writes with more than a trace of the rueful resignation and wry disenchantment of much New Yorker fiction. His massive restraint sometimes brings his narrative to a dead halt; his quietness of tone sometimes verges on the inaudible. He can reduce the bone-wearying comic horrors of travel to a sentence as when Harold Rhodes, burdened with two lead-weight suitcases, just makes a train: "The station agent took their tickets gravely from between Harold's teeth." He has not created profound characters in the Rhodeses, but he has recorded a profound change of attitude. At book's beginning the heaviest luggage the Rhodeses carry is their own inferiority complex. They think they know what they want--to be French; at book's end they know and accept what they are--Americans. Treating Europe and America as parent and child, William Maxwell has unfolded the recurring cycle of maturity--to go home again, one must first be able to leave it.

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