Short Notices

THE CAT by Georges Simenon. 182 pages. Harcourf, Brace & World. $4.50.

At 64, with some 500 novels to his credit, Georges Simenon continues to demonstrate that he is a writer of extraordinary range--from murder-a-month Inspector Maigret thrillers to some of the most original psychodrama since Gide. These days his tone is quieter and more autumnal than it used to be; he is thinking hard about old age. His latest book suggests Edward Albee loose among the geriatric set, a Virginia Woolf on Medicare.

The Cat is the story of a widow and a widower whose hatred for each other is exceeded only by their common terror of dying alone. The Bouins married in their 60s, and now, in their 70s, their communication is limited to nasty little notes to each other. Simenon car ries their story along less by turns of plot than by twists of the knife. Venom becomes the sole remaining source of vitality. And when Marguerite Bouin dies, her husband, who hated her so, collapses. He has little hope of ever leaving the hospital.

By now, Simenon's stylistic economy has been sharpened to outright penury; the silences of the author are as telling as those of his characters. His one re maining indulgence is loving descriptions of a Paris that never loses its intimate ambiance, never grows old.

A HORSEMAN RIDING BY by R. F. Delderfield. 1,151 pages. Simon & Schuster. $7.50.

Although their ranks are thinning out, there are those who yearn for the fat novel overflowing with characters, spanning decades instead of days or hours. Right now, the best bargain of this sort is A Horseman Riding By, by the British playwright and novelist R. F. Delderfield. It is long enough (half a million words) to last a careful reader from now till the Fourth of July, and it is so transparently simple that neither its ideas nor ambiguities will startle anyone. Since it runs a course from the Boer War to Dunkirk and sticks to a small rural valley and about 100 characters, it may well be the swan-song novel of England's squirearchy.

The book's ingenuousness is not all to the bad. The valley is a microcosm of country life, and the young paternalistic squire who owns it wants only to keep it free of the incursions of progress. If the idyllic life he envisions for his tenants has more than a bearable streak of treacle, it is hard to cavil at the squire's well-meant fatherliness. Births, deaths, maids slipping into the shrubbery with the lads of their choice, the dotty and the shrewd, the pleasures of the bed and the hum of local politics--nothing escapes the chronicler's notice. But after a while the detail be comes soporific, the eye closes, and the thud is heard through the house as the book slides from the lap.

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