Counterfeit Love

THE ILLUSIONIST (250 pp.)--Franc,oise Mallet--Farrar, Straus & Young ($3).

Some of the most striking French fiction comes from precocious teenagers writing about teenagers. In Devil in the Flesh, 17-year-old Raymond Radiguet showed a boy drawn into a love affair with an older married woman and swamped by the first rush of passion. In Awakening, Jean-Baptiste Rossi, 16, told a startling but sensitive story of a love affair between a youngster and a Roman Catholic nun. In The Illusionist (written three years ago) 22-year-old Franc,oise Mallet, a Parisian housewife and mother, tells perhaps the strangest tale of all, that of a 15-year-old girl who falls in love with her father's mistress. When the book appeared in France last year, the weekly Le Peuple spoke for most of the critics when it said: "The Illusionist is not, strictly speaking, a masterpiece, but it is not far from one."

Innocent Eye. Helene Noris is a lonely, wide-eyed girl with her snub nose pressed flat against the windowpane of life. Her widowed father is a stuffy businessman parceling his time between his shops, his stocks and his political ambitions. When Helene wanders to the kitchen for companionship, the maid shoos her out, tells her: "Masters are masters and servants are servants! Society makes these rules." To give her life a dash of drama, Helene pretends, when in school, not to know her lessons--just to hear her classmates titter and her teachers upbraid her. Down deep she is convinced that, except for a miracle, "nothing will ever happen to me in all my life!"

Helene's miracle takes the form of a chance meeting with her father's Russian mistress, Tamara. To Tamara, who has lived precariously for most of her 35 years, Papa Noris is an anchor of security, though he never guesses how often and strangely she drags anchor. For Tamara is a Lesbian, too neurotically selfish for anything but a perverted counterfeit of love. But to the innocent eyes of Helene, Tamara's brusque, boyish charm, her low voice "rough as a cat's tongue," her disordered flat, a jungle den of cigarette smoke and weird African masks, has all the magnetic pull of an adolescent daydream come true.

The den into which Tamara gradually draws Helene turns out blacker than any jungle; it is a total eclipse of the soul. As their strange relationship progresses, both shame and secret jealousy prevents Helene from telling her father that she even sees Tamara. One day Tamara demands that she tell him, and slaps her viciously when she fails to do so. In a sobbing flare-up of independence, Helene cries, "You'll never see me again!" and leaves.

Her revolt is short and bitter. Humbly and penitently, she returns. From then on, Helene is made to suffer for every moment of pleasure. Tamara finally takes her to a Lesbian nightclub and abandons her to the pawings of a frumpy rival.

Is Everybody Happy? Up to this point, Author Mallet saves a distasteful story by telling it with poignance, and a style as spare as a fine Japanese print. When she tries to save her characters with a conventional happy ending, the effect is more pat than palatable.

Papa Noris, anxious to still village gossip about both him and his daughter in order to clinch a pending election, offers to marry Tamara. In the glib space of a few pages, Tamara blossoms into a dutiful bride and Helene into a mature young woman who sees through the illusion by which she has been enslaved.

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