Bugged Vegetable

TERRA AMATA by J.M.G. Le Clezio. 217 pages. Atheneum. $5.95.

The Germans may have the word for it: Weltschmerz. But French writers have a long tradition in it too--a literary bleating of the young in which the gyrations of the ephemeral self and the monumental turnings of the solar system get dizzily confused. J.M.G. Le Clezio is a handsome lad of 29 with sporting initials and a static style who has in recent years been a flashily successful practitioner of that mournful art. His first book, The Interrogation, a kind of Krapp's First Tape, won France's third most prestigious literary award, the Prix Renaudot. His second novel, The Flood, a further torrent of talent and eloquence put mainly to the purposes of adolescent simpering, was also drowned with praise. But it is doubtful if any amount of critical bolstering will be able to shore up his latest novel, which reads a bit like an endless progressive-rock lyric in search of a psychedelic score.

For Terra Arnata is plotless, guileless and garrulous. The non-hero is another of those nobodies who do nothing. The reader first meets him as a child playing God with potato bugs, and gradually watches him emerge pretty much as a bugged vegetable himself. In a series of widely spaced vignettes, portrayed as through a wobbly hand-held camera, he attends his father's funeral, makes desultory love to a nondescript girl in a hotel room, gets married, has a son, and finally dies. In between, he takes long walks, smokes endless cigarettes, compiles lists, uninventively takes inventories, floats cosmically, and grunts romantically.

To be sure, Le Clezio asks big questions, such as What is Life? with an earnest lyric gift. At times he captures the bubble-like transiency of youth with touching Gallic elan ("Who wrote 'I love you' on a cigarette paper and then smoked it? Who picked a flower and put it in a glass of water? Who ate a vanilla ice on September 14, 1966, at twenty-five minutes to midnight, thinking that it was an eternal ice-cream cone, an eternal ice, an eternal yellow-white flavour?"). He is also adept at playing those "In" games French readers love, the sounding of literary resonances from Pascal to Robbe-Grillet.

Such native stylistic ploys, like poetry, suffer dreadfully even in the best of translations, and this one, by Barbara Bray, is much too stiff-lipped, too unbendingly British. Ultimately, what does Le Clezio in, is his decision to mirror his Life-is-shapeless-and-meaningless view in its own terms. All arbitrary mood and no movement can't help making for a dull book. "Nothing is necessary any more," concludes the non-hero cryptically as he is being buried. "But neither is anything unnecessary." That phlegmatic formulation ought to come as some sort of wan, stoical triumph. In context it seems pretentious and enigmatic.

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