Johnny One-Note

ALL WOMEN ARE FATAL by Claude Mauriac. 308 pages. Braz///er. $4.95.

Bertrand Carnejoux is a roving young journalist of notable amatory agility. Every ripple in the stream of his consciousness reflects a preoccupation with sex, and he introduces a dozen different mistresses in the first 50 pages. But on page 31, Bertrand begins to speculate about writing a treatise, in the form of a novel, to be titled: The Phenomenology of Physical Love. The secret is out; this Don Juan is not a sexual athlete but a literary one, an aspiring philosopher of womanizing. As the reader reads on, he discovers that Claude Mauriac's new novel is hardly a novel at all, but more an anthology of aphorisms about the Frenchmen's favorite topic.

Despite Bertrand's roll call of lady loves, Amelinha to Yvette, little actually happens. Episode 1: Bertrand sun? himself on the beach at Rio with his mistress Mathilde and thinks about other women. Episode 2: he gets drunk at a Paris literary party thrown for him by his mistress Irene and thinks about other women. Episode 3: he wanders the streets of Manhattan after breaking up with Leslie and thinks about other wom en. Episode 4: he takes Francine to bed--and she should have kicked him out for thinking about other women. Total result of all this phenomenological error: "Women at best are interchangeable," and sexual love is a "victory over despair, the conquest of metaphysical solitude."

In such earlier novels as The Dinner Party, Author Mauriac (son of famed Catholic Novelist Francois Mauriac) proved himself one of the more readable and entertaining of the French writers apparently doing business as "new realists." This time, reaching for profundity about love and sex, he succeeds only in demonstrating that Don Juan, after all, is Johnny One-Note.

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