As She Lay Dying

THE GRASS (216 pp.)--Claude Simon, translated by Richard Howard--Braziller($3.75).

The best, and one of the most eccentric, of France's New Realist writers is Claude Simon, author of the powerful and murky novel, The Wind (TIME, April 13). His current book is a little less powerful and somewhat more murky. Author Simon's moody, fitful sentences blow on for a thousand words or so before subsiding. He qualifies each thought, hedges each qualification, follows divergent ideas out of sight through cat's cradles of parentheses and dashes. He is as fond as Faulkner of the present participle. When it seems that he must stop, affix a period and begin a new sentence with "He said . . .", Simon merely drops a comma to catch his breath and continues with "saying . . ." If Simon's chapter-sentences are read quickly, and if the reader does not follow his natural inclination to stop and sort out thoughts and thinkers, the effect can be astonishing. The author skillfully creates a sense of frenzy and foreboding.

Through the haze, objects, people and fragments of speech are seen and heard with heightened clarity. Mood and character are conveyed with subtlety and force. But complicated events and relationships often are lost to view.

The fact mattered little in The Wind, in which only one character is of much importance. The Grass, which tells the story of the deterioration of a French provincial family, as an old aunt lies dying, is more intricate and less suited to Simon's techniques. Parts of the book are brilliant--notably the scenes of bickering between the dying woman's brother and sister-in-law. Realist Simon forces the reader to note precisely the tics and twitches of decaying minds, and to feel the texture of withering flesh. But something is lost when Simon's subject is less elemental than death. The reader never really learns what is happening to the book's narrator, the daughter-in-law of the bickering couple. The same uncertain fog enshrouds her husband--or is it her lover? Ambiguity has its uses, but Author Simon's manner sometimes seems to be the pointless result of a powerful technique thoughtlessly applied.

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