On the Road

SIGNS AND WONDERS by Franc,oise Mallet-Joris. 408 pages. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $6.95.

Franc,oise Mallet-Joris writes in the tradition of Emile Zola. Her plots are complex and thickly populated, and her characters move up and down through the floors of French society like a gilt-and-glass Parisian elevator--and, often, at about the same speed.

Inexplicable Union. In this, her sixth novel, she deals with the France of the early 1960s, when De Gaulle was extricating his nation from the Algerian war and rabid rightists were murdering Arabs and detonating plastic bombs throughout France. Her protagonist, Nicolas Leclusier, is a great bearlike, brooding man. He had written a successful novel about his Russian mother, who had apparently died in a Nazi concentration camp. Now he is astounded to learn that his mother survived, is living in Germany, and is married to one of the former camp guards.

This inexplicable union of victim and executioner so unsettles Nicolas that he can no longer write fiction. To shape a new life, he takes a job with a new magazine, which assigns him to explore France "as you would the Amazon." He is accompanied on the quest by Marcelle Landau, a beautiful young woman who, because she had been a homely child, still thinks herself ugly. They become lovers, and since each is a grade A neurotic, the romance takes a rollercoaster course.

Along the way are vivid and beautifully described vignettes of rural France. The pair meets O.A.S. assassins and silky entrepreneurs, dislocated settlers and stranded Arabs. To Marcelle, these encounters are part of the breath of life, but to Nicolas they are increasing evidence that the world consists only of "mawkish absurdity and lunatic atrocity." His crack-up is inevitable and comes with measured solemnity. Each family confrontation--with his brother, who is a worker priest, with his doting father, his enigmatic mother--erodes a bit more of Nicolas' will to live, and so he kills himself.

The Demands of Love. Author Mallet-Joris, 36, counts among her considerable gifts the ability to present believable male characters, an art that is beyond many women writers. She is also a master of the trenchant phrase: a businessman has an "Easter Island head stuck on a penguin body"; a cantankerous father "needs to see his son unhappy in order to love him." She is one of those rare writers who can create worlds that readers instantly accept. Love, and its demands, are what her novel is about. Man's only choice, she says, is to accept the demands or die.

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