The Upper Depths

THE BYSTANDER (205 pp.)--Albert J. Guerard--Little, Brown ($3.75).

At some point of adolescence, every schoolboy falls distantly in love with an actress. Few do as complete a job as Anthony, the downbeat narrator of this new novel, who carries the torch for his actress over a stretch of 18 years and then, lamentably, achieves gratification.

Even as a schoolboy, Anthony is an odd one: an American with a background of wealth and parental indifference attending a Parisian lycee. At 15, eating ice cream and plum cake in a tearoom near the Madeleine, Anthony finds the courage to speak worshipfully to Christiane Mondor, a 22-year-old, swan-necked beauty who is moving through her first season of heady triumphs on the stage.

They meet again nearly two decades later amid the summer languors of the Riviera. Life has been rough. The adult Anthony is now a "writer, artist, translator, hack; gambler, sensualist, fool," and more importantly, has become an "onlooker at his own ruin." Cursed with a slim annuity adequate for subsistence but not for pleasure, he has slowly lowered himself into squalor "as by a rope." Christiane's failures have paced his own: two unsuccessful marriages (one to a South American millionaire, the other to a German industrialist) and a scandal of a perversity startling even to Paris.

Their affair seems to offer each of them a chance of recapturing the hopes of youth. Anthony accepts his own degradation but romantically believes that Christiane has been able to carry her innocence through the mire of the years. Yet nothing has changed. He is still the petulant adolescent and she the woman who can be had but not possessed. Soon Christiane floats away on the superficiality that has always sustained her; Anthony sinks like a stone into the slums "to vanish up obscure alleys, to discover the filthiest restaurants and most squalid lodgings, to fuse with the dirty and the degraded."

Author Guerard (The Hunted, Maquisard), 43, is a Texas-born Francophile who is currently professor of English at Harvard. He writes with a Gallic coolness and clarity, and with the sure French eye for the inhuman qualities of the human condition. This novel, his fifth, has both wit and wisdom, but his major characters are fated to sound like literary echoes: charming as Christiane is, she has been met before more charmingly in the pages of Colette; Anthony, in his bedridden sloth, his antisocial despairs, his wounded intellectual cries, has slouched through a long line of novels ranging from Ivan Goncharov's Oblomov to Louis-Ferdinand Celine's Journey to the End of the Night.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.