A Practiced Hand

THE LITTLE SAINT by Georges Simenon. 186 pages. Harcourt, Brace & World. $4.50.

"When I don't write, I am sick."

The statement possibly explains why Georges Simenon, at 62, has hardly been sick a day in his life. At 16, as a high school dropout in Liege, Belgium, he finished his first novel. At 19, he began producing prose for the Paris pulps at the rate of 80 pages a day. In less than four years he knocked out "more than 300" (he soon lost count) novels and novelettes, and once actually splattered off a quite readable novel in 25 hours. At 25, he dropped his 17 pseudonyms, invented Inspector Maigret, and wrote the first of "more than 60" detective novels that have made him the most famous of French whodunists. In his 30s he began to write an occasional straight novel (The Snow Is Black, The Bells of Bicetre), and he wrote them with such fierce finesse that Andre Gide pronounced him "perhaps the greatest and most truly novelistic novelist in French literature today."

In his 500th novel, give or take a dozen or two, Simenon accepts a handicap that only a master could overcome: The Little Saint is a book in which nothing happens. The hero is "a perfectly serene character, in immediate contact with nature and life." All through his boyhood in a poor quarter of Paris he sees pictures in his head; all through his adult life he translates these pictures into paintings. His life is a variety of religious experience--scarcely an exciting subject for fiction. Simenon nevertheless discovers a shimmering excitement in the subject. He sets up two poles of vitality--a creative genius and the seething slum he inhabits--and then calmly records the patterns that propagate between them.

The author's style is simple, swift and so lucid that the reader always sees exactly what Simenon wants him to see but never quite how Simenon makes him see it. In this case, Simenon makes the reader see how the creative process actually proceeds, and at the same time achieves one of the few absolutely lovable characters he has ever created. "If I were allowed to keep only one of my novels," he remarked not long ago with unaccustomed self-satisfaction, "I would choose this one." It is indeed one of the finest sections in the all-too-human comedy of this barebones Balzac.

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