The Incoherent Man

THE SELVES OF QUINTE by Marcel Moreau. 248 pages. Braziller. $5.

Scene: the bedroom of the Definitive Woman, who lies stretched on the bed, long and loose. At her side is Quinte, the Incoherent Man. Quinte has been through hell, poor fellow. His marriage is a shell. He has been fired from his job and rejected by the Club. Now, to his dismay, Quinte discovers that the Definitive Woman is not a virgin, after all. "Perhaps," he says, fondling her frantically, "there are other ways to art?"

The trouble with this hallucinatory first novel is that Author Moreau i trying to be like Sartre, only smartre. His intense existentialism is closer to dementia, and the result is a raging stream of semiconsciousness in which real and imagined horrors swim by, indistinguishable and unreal. "You go through streets but you do not see the streets, you go through people but you do not see the people," muses Quinte, who doesn't.

Quinte's head is "a tiny gymnasium swarming with all kinds of athletes in the process of exercising variously"--but afraid to compete. He despises uniformity but craves membership in the Club. He rebels against mediocrity but tells himself he is "too mediocre to think of beauty." His blood boils with desire, "very strong desire that knocks about everything, zigzagging, starved, steeped in pride and filth," but he follows his impulses only in dreams. In the end, says Quinte, "one finds oneself with all those others, those terrible others, who resemble each other and whom I resemble, and who also resemble infinite tatters."

Moreau has a Belgian's gift for morose images ("the silence massed there like a dump of faded echoes") and the surreal ("He swam across stones, he crossed chromogeneous skies, fields paved with spines, the breath of cowards"). When his book was published in France last year, Paris' two top literary monthlies hailed him as "one of the great writers of our time." But Selves is too agonized and too labored. Intended as a critique of the inner man, it comes out as a shriek.

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