Gallic Snake Pit

HEAD AGAINST THE WALL (255 pp.)--Herve Bazin--Prentice-Hall ($3.95).

The rakehell son is an old favorite of French fiction, and so is the mean-spirited bourgeois father who fails to understand him. From this familiar combination, a truculent French novelist named Herve Bazin has written a fresh if uneven novel.

Arthur Gerane had vexed Judge Gssrane for years. He had run away from college, wasted his money, refused to go to work. It was the last straw when Arthur rifled his father's desk--and then rammed the family car into a tree in making his getaway. Judge Gerane had Arthur committed to an asylum as a psychopath.

Arthur was cocky at first; later, chafing under asylum boredom, he became desperate. When he was released for a while, two years later, he was a broken man, and the rest of his life was to be a shuttle in & out of mental wards. When Arthur was free, he cadged and thieved, betrayed his accomplices, married a trusting farm girl without telling her about his past. When he was put away, he kept trying to escape; but in an honest moment he had to admit that he felt at home in the asylum. "The walls seemed as familiar...as the bottom of his pocket."

Arthur himself is a dreary specimen, but what happens to him is often fascinating. Novelist Bazin writes with impressive authority about the treatment of patients, the warm baths in which they are lulled, the prolonged torpor and occasional flights of excitement in which they subsist, the subtle divisions of status that arise among them, as if in mocking duplicate of the outer world.

The weakness of Head Against the Wall is that nowhere does its author show the causes of Arthur's collapse. At one or two points Novelist Bazin hints that his hero is a persecuted rebel, and the publisher, taking up this cue, describes Arthur as "a young man victimized by a degenerate environment." On the evidence of the novel, however, Arthur victimizes society a bit more than society victimizes him.

Thirty-five-year-old Novelist Bazin may have a sneaking sympathy for his hero. As a youngster, he took his father's car, skidded into a tree, went through the windshield headfirst, and spent two years in an asylum for "pathological deviation of intellectual kind." There, however, whatever resemblance Bazin may seem to have to his hero ceases. Since his discharge, Bazin has established himself as one of France's promising young authors.

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