French Nightmare

THE JOKER (319 pp.)--Jean Malaquais --Doubleday ($3.95).

A century ago, when the historical optimists still believed in eternal progress, the earthly future looked like bright heaven. Today, for a whole school of literary pessimists, it looks like unshaded hell. The harbingers of doom, headed by Aldous Huxley (Brave New World) and George Orwell (Nineteen Eighty-Four), have now been joined by Frenchman Jean Malaquais. His world of the future is as grim a nightmare as theirs. But the hero of Malaquais' The Joker is not one to surrender to a nightmare. What makes him different from most of his fictional counterparts is his unbreakable will to live.

A Super-Babitch. The Joker in the original French is Le Gaffeur, a fellow who always does the wrong thing. Pierre Javelin lives in a police state called the City, where the sky is never visible and people live in parallelepipeds, geometrical monstrosities housing up to 5,000 families. Pierre is not aware that he has done anything wrong when, arriving home one night, he cannot turn his key in the lock. A giant "with a Russian mustache" is living in the apartment, and Pierre's wife is gone.

In the next few days the ashen-faced gaffeur, scarcely eating or sleeping, blunders through a dream world that is Novelist Malaquais' vision of hell. The City sees all, hears all; it exacts silence from its citizens and demands that they draw up reports about each other. Pierre's neighbors don't know him; the telephone company denies he has a telephone; and his wife's office, the National Institute of Applied Idiosyncrasy (motto: Watch Your Step), acts as if she doesn't exist. Before the City is through with him, Pierre also loses his job, pay, birth certificate and signature. But he manages to keep his sanity.

What the City really wants to take from him is his inmost self, his individual reality. The struggle is conducted in quasi-metaphysical colloquies through Dr. Bab-itch, "an impersonal emanation of a depersonalized office which in turn stems from another office, and so on, in concentric circles, up to the very ectoplasm, the super-Babitch." What Pierre means by "being no one." i.e., belonging to the City, is what Babitch means by "being." He tries to make Pierre accept the proposition, "I crawl, therefore I am." Against all pressure, Pierre resists, for he knows that to agree is to die.

A Winning Joker. Novelist Malaquais' triumphant joker seems to come from a stacked deck when Pierre, le gaffeur, wins against the overwhelming odds of the City. His prescription, a sardonically simple one, is set forth in an epigraph from Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre:

"And what is hell? Can you tell me that?"

"A pit full of fire."

"And should you like to fall into that pit, and to be burning there forever?"

"No, sir."

"What must you do to avoid it?"

"I must keep in good health, and not die."

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