The Man-Eaters

A TRIBE OF WOMEN (248 pp.)--Hervee Bazin--Simon & Schuster ($3.75).

Women and cannibals eat Ihe same food --men. That, at any rate, is the acidulous theme of French Novelist Herve Bazin's A Tribe of Women. The four women who dwell at La Fouve, a windswept, French provincial Manderley, are sisters to the witches in Macbeth. They bubble and bubble, toil and make trouble.

There is Mama Isabelle, who licks her chops over a monthly alimony check, all that is left of Hubby No. 1. Mama has two young daughters, a pudgy, harmless lunatic and a redheaded spitfire. Mama and the redhead are so close that they not only share the same name, but split it: the daughter is called Isa, and Mama.

Belle. Finally, there is the family retainer, Nathalie, a formidable old bag of moles, chin hairs and salty folk proverbs. The four women are snug and smug; they have pooled their womanish fears to put life, as normally lived, in the wrong.

Weapons of the Unarmed. It is Belle who lets the enemy enter no man's land. She falls in love, and brings home Hubby No. 2, a tall, wan, thirtyish lawyer named Maurice. Almost instinctively, Isa, Nathalie, and the demented sister proceed to devour Maurice's peace of mind. They use the weapons of the unarmed: inertia, silence, cunning. They cough when poor Maurice lights a cigarette, cook all the dishes he detests, fall silent, as if spied on, when he enters a room.

The pinpricks are felt, but Belle is the real victim. She falls prey to a peculiarly horrifying variety of lupus, a disease that leaves her skin pocked and blotched. Nature turns the tables on 18-year-old Isa, too. As the mother fails, the daughter blooms. From Isa's great hate for Maurice blossoms, first, interest, and next, fascination. One midnight, when the slip-clad girl goes downstairs to fasten a banging door, she is waylaid by the panther-ishly urgent lawyer. Next morning she tries in vain to scare up her conscience: "You have a lover. You slept with your stepfather."

Illicit by Another Name. When Isa and Maurice cannot kill their illicit love, they decide to clear its name. They call it "passion" and proceed to enjoy it. But with Belle's death, Isa feels the birthpangs of guilt ("dead . . . she divided us forever"). Isa and Maurice quarrel, Gallic-fashion, over the disposition of La Fouve. Then the women again close ranks, and that episodic intruder, man, is expelled bewildered from this strange Garden of Eves. With fitting irony, Maurice leaves Isa pregnant with a daughter to carry on the cycle of gynarchy.

Author Bazin, 47, writes sparely or sensuously as the mood of his novel demands. His insights into feminine psychology are acute, and a book that might have succumbed to formula patness moves with a mythic interior logic. Rarely, indeed, has a mere man so well defined the dynamics of the female life drive, in which man is at once a biological necessity and an emotional luxury.

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