Judgment of Paris

By Timothy Foote

THE MERRY MONTH OF MAY by James Jones. 361 pages. Delacorte. $7.95.

By choice and dedication, James Jones is a peculiarly American American novelist. His method is oldfashioned, gulp-and-sob realism. His characters--most frequently, of late, the American newly rich who took the cash and let the culture go--are presented pretty much in their own words. The result often brings to mind Nancy Mitford's unkind remark that citizens of the U.S. speak English as if wrestling with a foreign tongue. That confronts the thoughtful pro-Jones reader with a dilemma. If Jones takes these cliches seriously, can he be any smarter than the people he writes about? If he doesn't, can he--pure commerce aside--be taken seriously at all?

Well, he can and he can't--for reasons discernible in his new Book-of-the-Month Club novel set in Paris during the May 1968 student revolution. Initially, there is much to put one off: the usual repetitiousness; those sentences that go clunk in the night; perceptions about humanity better suited to a book called The Merry Month of Jejune.

The book is stuffed with middleaged, rich-living, highly sexed Americans in Paris, including Harry Gallagher, a 49-year-old liberal film writer who lives (like Jones) on the He St.-Louis in a fabulous apartment decked out with weapons and books, skis and aqualungs, plus a church pulpit for a bar. The generation gap conveniently yawns between Gallagher and his son Hill, a 19-year-old Sorbonne student anarchist. Paris has no real race problem, but Jones has kept in touch with the folks back home. He introduces a beautiful, chocolate-bar-chomping black female teenage destroyer of white domestic bliss whose tastes run to trilingual sex. ("She isn't immoral," one character reflects, adding, with the air of discovering a new word, "she's amoral.")

Harry is "a winner," tall and wildly attractive to young women. "Entering the bottom edge of middle age," Jones writes, "he could relax a little and look back without anger." With his wife Louisa he gives regular Sunday suppers for the American colony (as does Jones), and his apartment becomes a kind of command post from which expatriates uneasily sally forth to see the carnage between the kids and De Gaulle's cops. On Jones' track record one might expect Harry to be hero-protagonist. Instead, the book produces Jonathan James Hartley III, a creaky, equivocal observer-narrator who could easily have been borrowed (in intent if not execution) from Henry James or Glenway Wescott.

"A failed poet, a failed novelist, and a drop-out husband," Hartley has a mistress but he remarks with a straight face that female bodies interest him "less than female minds." Like many Jones characters he suffers from acute typecasting. As narrator, moreover, Hartley can be tiresomely chatty when extolling food or explaining that a beer at the Brasserie Lipp is called un serieux. But what weary reader will not thank him for such mercifully brief love-making moments as this: "I suppose we did just about everything that two people do together"?

Hartley grows on the reader somewhat, as the revolution and the Gallagher family come simultaneously unstuck. Under personal stress, Harry Gallagher becomes a less and less likable sexual chauvinist. Ambiguous, personally and artistically flawed, Hartley nevertheless comes on as a low-key cicerone to Jones' inner misgivings about the destruction wrought by guilt, unbridled lust and sheer machismo.

Among the victims is Harry's wife Louisa. Jones turns her into a near vegetable as the result of an attempted suicide. Such retribution might have been taken as a sign of the author's seriousness when happy endings were still in fashion. Today literary death seems more like escapism (as in Love Story). Letting the lady live on in some domesticity or other would have been a truer and crueler fate.

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