Hello, Emptiness!

THOSE WITHOUT SHADOWS (125 pp.) -Franc,oise Sagan - Dutton ($2.95). Fifty million Frenchmen cannot only be wrong, they can be plain silly. Since the beginning of last month they have bought nearly 350,000 copies (the U.S. equivalent of more than 1,000,000 sales) of a new novel by Franchise Sagan, and the best that can be said for it is that reading its proofs may have done her some good as occupational therapy following her recent near-fatal auto accident. Author Sagan's Bonjour Tristesse and A Certain Smile showed a certain flair and skill, gave many readers the intriguing sensation of observing precocious children playing grown-up games. In Those Without Shadows, the kids are a little older and they are no longer saying bonjour to sadness; in the words of a current U.S. pop tune, they are shouting "Hello, Emptiness!"

As before, Author Sagan, 22, is principally preoccupied with sex. But where in her earlier books sex was at least intermittently pleasant, it now seems to have become a wearisome compulsion to be borne like kleptomania or a facial tic. And where characters used to get involved with each other in reasonably manageable triangles and quadrangles, in this book Author Sagan's sexual geometry clearly has got out of hand. The pack of people who meet at the home of Alain Maligrasse, an editor in a Paris publishing firm, have one common denominator: they are in love with people who are in love with someone else.

Alain wants a young actress, but the actress, who has already been the property of Alain's assistant, Bernard, falls for Alain's cousin from Normandy. Does this mean that Alain goes back to his wife Fanny? No, he winds up as a barfly and close friend of a prostitute. As for Bernard, he does not want the actress; he wants Josee, who is beautiful, drives fast cars and gets more money than anyone needs from her family in North Africa. Naturally, she does not want any part of Bernard. For her it is a vulgar-but-vital medical student who can take her or leave her. As a result, Bernard is very sad and does not have much use for his nice young wife Nicole. For once Author Sagan is thoughtless of the needs of her characters: she fails to provide a lover for Nicole.

The rest of the novel offers more of the same -other vices, other rooms, and a whole collection of young-old aphorisms at the level of: "the most jaded appetite can be stimulated by privation." No privation could be healthier for U.S. literary appetites than a season or two without a book by Franc,oise Sagan.

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