Petrified Nature

THE INTERROGATION by J.M.G. Le Clezio. 243 pages. Atheneum. $4.50.

A character in Albert Camus' The Plague devised a strategy for cheating death by making life seem to drag on as long as possible: he did tedious things on purpose, like listening to lectures in an unfamiliar language or lining up at the box office for theater tickets and then not buying a seat. Since French literary inbreeding is both chronic and severe, it was inevitable that sooner or later someone would devote a whole book to Camus' throwaway idea. J.M.G. Le Clezio has in effect done just that, in a first novel that has unaccountably enraptured the French critics and public.

Adam Polio is camping out for the summer in a deserted house at the top of a hill "like one of those sick animals that make a canny retreat into some refuge and watch stealthily for danger." He does almost nothing at all, and does it so well that his perceptions suffer strange and vivid changes as in the first symptoms of paranoia or LSD poisoning.

Adam sunbathes, smokes, writes to his girl friend, sees the sun transformed into a monstrous spider or a thousandarmed octopus. His girl visits him. They go to the beach, where Adam feels himself turning to a statue, "his flesh freezing into a minera1." He runs, and suddenly knows that the earth is hostile, molten under a thick crust; he has visions of "the flames of petrified nature." He goes to the zoo, and feels "at one with the lizards, mice, beetles or pelicans. He has discovered that the best way to mix with a species is to make oneself desire a female member of it." He follows a dog through town, almost becomes a dog, is "in any case no longer human." He kills a rat. He takes a long walk in the rain, sees a drowned man, tries to call his girl, gets drunk. Finally he goes the rest of the way mad.

Author Jean Marie Gustave Le Clezio, 24, is half French, half English, tall and gaunt, has been lionized by Paris literary hostesses, who find his book a required topic of conversation and its author "frightfully good-looking." Since its publication a year ago, it has sold the exceptional total of 110,000 copies, and has won the highbrow Renaudot Prize. It has intense visual strength and might easily be transcribed into a New Wave movie by some current master of the jolting, hand-held camera. Yet it lacks human warmth, and ends as another pale variation of the modish French anti-novel--truly a tale of tedium.

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