Eddies of Thought

THE MARQUISE WENT OUT AT FIVE (311 pp.)--Claude Mauriac--Braziller ($4.95).

Quick color in the muddled crowd: a pretty girl in tight blue pants runs at top speed through the Paris square and disappears. Her passage stirs eddies of emotion. For a traffic policeman boredom dissipates briefly; he lusts sharply and happily. A woman sneers contemptuously; obviously the girl is a slut, because quite apparently she is wearing no brassiere. A plainclothes detective on a stake-out forgets his ambush to gawk; an aging homosexual glances at the girl in envy; a bookstore owner obsessed with the past history of this quarter of Paris barely sees the girl as she passes before his eyes. And a novelist named Carnejoux, watching the square from his balcony, is excited: first, because he is as lustful as the detective and the traffic cop, and second, because he knows that the beautiful, bouncing runner will make a fine incident in the avant-garde novel he intends to write about an hour's jumble of thoughts in the Carrefour de Buci.

Carnejoux is the alter ego of Novelist Claude Mauriac, son of Francois Mauriac.

Young Mauriac is perhaps the most appealing and most readily understandable (if not the most profound) of the French group variously called the Anti-Novelists, the New Realists or merely the New Novelists. These tags are not very illuminating, and none could be satisfactory, because the writings of Mauriac, Michel Butor, Claude Simon, Alain Robbe-Grillet and Nathalie Sarraute do not much resemble one another; the authors are a movement only in that each rejects the conventional psychological novel.

Mauriac's technique uses only thoughts and dialogue; there is no narrative and no plot. But he is easy on his readers; his interior monologues are phrased mostly in complete sentences, and although he shifts characters from paragraph to paragraph, there is usually some indication of who is doing the thinking.

There is probably a limit to how much can be said with Mauriac's method, but fortunately the author, unlike most avantgardists, feels no compulsion to be deep. His slight, amusing novel, The Dinner Party, merely proved slyly that the host (Carnejoux again) and most of his guests were intricately and sexually involved with one another. The present book proves even less, and is equally charming. Its effect is that of sitting in the sun at an outdoor cafe, slightly muzzy from wine, and imagining idly what is going on in the heads of the passersby.

The novel's title, as Mauriac explains in the foreword, derives from a remark by Poet Paul Valery. who said he had never written a novel because he could not bear to set down the banal first words, "The Marquise went out at five." The book is to be taken as an answer to Valery's implied charge that plain statement of fact is dull. "A pure exercise in virtuosity, you might say at first glance," says Mauriac. "Yet never gratuitous. But how to exhaust the gifts of reality?" Mauriac, who explains that he prefers literal exactitude to literature because he has "purified [his writing] of the last traces of fiction," certainly displays more than virtuosity. But how far can any author go with just a random thought-recorder? For no man needs to be told that the gifts of reality are confusing. He looks to novelists to give these gifts shape and meaning--and that Mauriac refuses to do.

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