Cloud One

THE WONDERFUL CLOUDS (128 pp.)--Franc,oise Sagan--Dutton ($3).

"Who would imagine that on the very day of her young and handsome husband's exhibition, Josee Ash would make love half-dressed in a bathroom five yards square with an old friend whom she was not in love with?" Who would? Franc,oise Sagan, that's who. Josee, languorous and French, is married to Alan, a rich American boy with a bronze torso, narrow hips, a sturdy neck and no job. Through a series of quickly turned scenes and even more quickly performed vignettes of sexual dalliance (involving half a dozen people in extraordinary geometries), Sagan follows their marriage to its inevitable dissolution.

"The mangrove stood out black against Key Largo's garish blue sky," the novel begins, and the readers can almost see the ghost of Humphrey Bogart standing under it, whistling for Lauren Bacall. Josee goes off with a Chris-Craft skipper named Ricardo, then presents her husband with a cake bearing a single burning candle--"to celebrate the first time I've been unfaithful to you." They separate in New York, after roaming Harlem until dawn and finishing off the adventure in "a small, deserted bar on Broadway"--a foreign fictional figment which, as every bag-eyed nightclubber knows, does not exist.

From start to finish, the whole narrative is ludicrous, but perhaps that is what Franc,oise Sagan hopes to say about life.

A putatively good writer whose work al ways contains a handful of the little sour plums she cultivates so well, she apparently hates to waste her time writing. She says just enough to make it to the other side of 100 pages--which is the book's biggest virtue.

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