Togetherness

By R.Z. Sheppard

MAN, WOMAN AND CHILD

by Erich Segal

Harper & Row; 244 pages; $9.95

Europe as the seducer of American innocence is a theme that has played well at all levels of U.S. fiction, from Hawthorne's The Marble Faun to Erich Segal's latest love story, Man, Woman and Child. As usual, Segal's principal characters are bright, attractive and preppie. Bob Beckwith, Yale '59, is an esteemed professor of statistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His wife Sheila, Vassar '60, is a highly valued editor at a university press. The marriage is an ideal balance of temperaments, love, devotion, respect and affection. There are two blossoming daughters, a homestead in Lexington, Mass., and a summer place on Cape Cod.

This is the sort of setup that tempts jealous gods and novelists. What will it be this time: brain tumor? Hodgkin's disease? coronary bypass? Segal has something more imaginative in mind. In 1968 Husband Bob attended a conference in the south of France. The country was gripped by unrest, and he managed to get his head in the way of a policeman's cosh. First aid was administered by a beautiful female physician who then prescribed house calls. What patient could resist such doctor's orders?

Ten years later the bill arrives. A French acquaintance calls to say that the woman, Nicole Guerin, has been killed in an auto accident, leaving her nine-year-old son Jean-Claude an orphan. The caller is certain that Bob is the father of the child. Bob accepts paternity on rather thin evidence and is immediately skewered by a dilemma: Should he clam up and preserve the perfection of his homelife or fess up and accept responsibility for his illegitimate son?

As a successful American male, Bob would like it both ways. This raises a question as to who is the real bastard. Bob confesses to Sheila who, though shaken, agrees to allow Jean-Claude a month on the Cape with the family. He is introduced only as the son of a friend who has died.

The boy arrives, grave, studious and one heck of a soccer player. Bob feels stirrings of pride; the situation severely strains Sheila's extraordinary generosity. Jean-Claude is the sort of irritant around which pearls are formed. Still, when the Beckwith girls get wind of the truth, Sheila insists that the boy must go. There is the inevitable life-threatening situation and a conclusion with the distinctive aftertaste of artificial sweeteners.

But why quibble? The time has long passed when it was amusing to use Erich Segal for bayonet practice. The boy from Brooklyn, N.Y., who became an Ivy League classics professor and bestselling author, tells a good story, or rather he pictures one. His narrative technique is more cinematic than literary. In addition, Love Story and its sequel Oliver's Story owed their popularity to one of Hollywood's most successful formulas. Like the old immigrant movie moguls, Segal has a shrewd instinct for providing audiences with idealizations of America's traditional affluent classes. There can be trouble and even tragedy in Franchot Tone country, but no one shouts, keens, throws things or dresses badly. --R.Z. Sheppard

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