Postcocious Adult

AIMEZ-VOUS BRAHMS . . (127 pp.)--Franc,oise Sagan--Dutton ($2.95).

To some readers. Franc,oise Sagan's novels are of interest chiefly for the light they seem to reflect on their author. In Bonjour Tristesse, the light revealed a child passionately and exuberantly weary of the world, but now it shows an adult who seems tired of writing books. There is little in Author Sagan's latest (and fourth) novel worth a compliment or a damn, although readers with an ironic turn of mind may cherish the 23-year-old author's reference to "that incomparable love that comes with age." The story, hardly more than the unhatched egg of a novel, concerns Paule--the only character whom the author has troubled to make credible--a pretty divorcee who, in her black moods, has begun to ask a hard question of her mirror: If spirits sag. can flesh be far behind? Standing on the brink of 40, she has avoided tristesse more successfully than most Sagan characters, but Roger, the latest of her lovers, has become much too considerate. After an evening of bistro crawling, he drops her off at her flat, saying, "I'll let you sleep. See you tomorrow, darling.'' Lately, Paule reflects, he has let her sleep more and more often.

What Paule wants is to marry Roger, a pipe-smoking, frail-chasing, hairy-handed brute a few years her senior, who lacks only a trout to look like a Field & Stream ad. What she gets is a febrile few months with Simon, a delicate, beautiful and overmothered young man of 25. Neither fellow is of a sort likely to be encountered except in the lavender dells of a schoolgirl's fancy.

Such postcocity may not be very surprising, but it does little to support the author's reputation as Colette's successor in the heart-has-its-reasons trade.

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