Situation Tragedy

THE PLANETARIUM (296 pp.)--Nathalie Sarraute--Braziller ($4).

Although France's "New Realists'' form one of the few distinct literary schools to appear since World War II. the movement is neither wholly new nor wholly realistic.

In its preoccupation with the subsoil of the mind, it owes much to Joyce and Proust, and in its meticulous focusing on reality it often achieves unreal effects--just as a section of skin under a microscope does not look like skin but like a lunar landscape. Despite frequent stretches of dullness, the New Realist writers are sometimes fascinating because they have moved away from the facile psychology and sociology that filled so much fiction in the '30s and '40s; their characters seem to float through the vast emptiness of society like planets close to collision.

The latest novel by Nathalie Sarraute, queen of the New Realists, has a plot so simple as to be almost invisible: Will Newlyweds Alain and Gisele succeed in forcing widowed Aunt Berthe to let them have her spacious five-room apartment? Will Alain be accepted in the salon of a famed writer? But the style is as complex as the plot is simple. Author Sarraute plunges deep into the interior dialogue of first one and then another character, while the reader, like a cryptographer, is expected to find clues of identity where he can.

In a self-contained opening chapter.

Aunt Berthe is on a roller coaster of feminine suspense as decorators install a new oval door in her luxurious apartment.

First she is uplifted as she decides the door is even more beautiful than she imagined; then she is drained of confidence, as it seems to have a "faked, added-on look,'' and she suspects that "there's some cold-blooded will, some sly malevolence" behind it.

These silent screams of despair and soundless shouts of joy are what interest Author Sarraute. When Alain, launched on a long, funny story, realizes in mid-speech that his listeners are becoming bored, he cannot decide whether to aban don the story or blunder on to its now flat conclusion. When Gisele's jovial mother wants to surprise the newlyweds with a gift of leather chairs and discovers that the gift is unwanted, self-pity drowns her.

Everyday crises of this sort are strangely reminiscent of what in TV parlance is known as "situation comedy." except that the meaning here is dead serious -- adding up to a type of literature that might be called situation tragedy.

In describing these tiny embarrass ments, contests of will, vain attempts to please. Author Sarraute puts them under a microscope and painstakingly focuses and refocuses it till they are seen absolutely clearly but magnified a hundred fold. The character-specimens are so hypersensitive to each passing emotion that in real life they would probably need to seek asylum -- or take up writing New Realist novels on their own. But Author Sarraute's skillful pressing on the neurotic nerve is bound to awaken shocks of recognition in the persevering reader, suggesting, among other things, that no man is a hero to his subconscious.

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