Prize Pizazz

Staff members of Fair magazine are viewing the body of Miss Blaisie, an editorial secretary who lias died at the age of 30. The corpse is fitted with a modish sheath dress and has a typewriter on its lap. "You look odd," says Bahs aside to Gianna. She replies: "Don't you think it repulsive to see our Blaisie, our dignified Blaisie, with a bare shoulder and her Underwood on her belly?"

This picture of ritual life and death on an American fashion magazine brightens the pages of Ouhlier Palerme (To Forget Palermo), the novel that last week won France's celebrated Prix Goncourt. Though a colleague claims that the author "really saw this happen in New York," Edmonde Charles-Roux herself denies that Fair is a takeoff on Vogue, which employed her for 16 years. Curiously, the French lady was fired five months ago as editor of the French edition of Vogue, not for her macabre writing but, so she says, because she had argued that "ye-ye styles" were not appropriate for French bourgeois women. She insists that her novel had already been completed, was not written "as a sort of vengeance."

The Infighting. A dark-haired daughter of a Marseille family, Mile. Charles-Roux, 44, was raised in Italy, where her father was French Ambassador to the Vatican. Like the long-forgotten works of other postwar mandarins, her novel berates the crass profit motive in the U.S., speaks of "the grip of money on each face." One episode tells of "Babs," a leggy New York career girl and Fair staffer who marries an Italian-American political boss and goes with him to Sicily, where women have a considerably different role from the one she is accustomed to. The narrator is Gianna, another Fair lady who is fleeing an unhappy past in Palermo. She is shocked to find that the magazine invokes "the phantom of beauty" only to justify "the worst kind of commercialism"--catering to its readers' feminine whims.

Thanks to the Prix Goncourt, Mile, Charles-Roux will certainly reap her own commercial benefits from the book. The Prix Goncourt novel each year makes just about everyone's Christmas shopping list, bringing sudden rewards to the hitherto unrecognized authors that it honors. Though Marcel Proust and Andre Malraux were among past winners, the jury--whose average age is 74--always picks a book that has enough pizazz for the mass reader. With its explicit sexual passages, Oublier Palerme could sell as many as 400,000 copies in France this year, will doubtless be quickly translated into English and other languages.

Not Too Proud. As Novelist Franc,ois Nourissier sees it, one reason that Oublier Palerme won was that Mile. Charles-Roux "comes from a well-known family and had no enemies on the jury." His remark suggests the intrigue that occurs in the demimonde of belles-lettres over the some 1,850 French literary prizes that are awarded each year. Nourissier, himself a former Vogue editor who resigned because Mile. "Charles-Roux was fired, captured this year's less lucrative but prestigious Academic Franchise prize for his Line Histoire Franc,aise a nostalgic reverie in which a man adjusts his boyhood dreams to the new conditions of France. Known as "The Immortals," the academy's haughty members are not too proud for infighting either, gained a publicity jump on the Goncourt by announcing their choice a few days before it.

As for Mile. Charles-Roux, despite her apparent objections to the style and values of the New World, she finds New York "a hundred times more stimulating than Paris." Says she: "As soon as I have the money--and I hope it will be the small fortune that I deserve--I will go right back to New York."

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