Who Is Sane?

RENDEZVOUS AT BRUGES (319 pp.)--Armand Lanoux--Putnam ($3.95).

This is a very American novel written by a Frenchman about Belgium. The U.S. note is insistently struck when Robert Drouin, a Paris TV producer, drives through an all-night snowstorm across a wide Flanders plain as featureless and flat as any Midwestern prairie. He asks directions at a roadside inn where huge transcontinental trucks cluster and the room rocks with the blare of a jukebox and the colored lights and clatter of pinball machines. Even the ancient, canal-veined city of Bruges, whose chimes and carillons sound like "pianos in the sky," has a night face of glaring neon and "pure American" funeral parlors with displays of open, polished coffins.

Drouin's destination is Mariakerke, a large, gloomy insane asylum where his old friend Du Roy is an intern. Both men are plagued by the European past, the American present and the possibly harrowing future. Drouin, his right hand maimed by battle wounds, has "got war" the way other people have smallpox. Du Roy, who plunged from the idealism of the resistance to light-fingered wealth in the black market, has turned to medicine out of guilt. The two men circle like scavengers over the asylum, searching for glints of God or reason in the chatter of psychotics and the mechanical responses of schizophrenics. Drouin zeroes in on a repellent, bandy-legged alcoholic named Van Welde, a war veteran in whom he sees the false and true heroes of all times --and in whom he finally recognizes an old, detested comrade in arms.

Novelist Lanoux, 47, writes in a nervous, jazz-paced style, equally appropriate to bars and Bedlam. His message is that there is not much difference inside or outside the asylum. The dedicated chief psychiatrist at Mariakerke. who plays 400 different roles, one for each of his lunatics, concludes gloomily that "the more care you provide, the more patients you find," and thinks, not unhappily, that "if I were to let go, I'd pass over to the other side."

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