Under the Rhubarb Plant

Nowhere is the book-judging business so enterprising as in France. Each year a solemnitude of juries bestows some 800 awards on every sort of oeuvre, ranging from the Prix Litteraire du Football for the best book about soccer to the Prix des Volcans for the warmest tribute to the hot springs of Auvergne.

Most popular excitement, however, is generated by the top three or four prizes for novels--which are presented to previously unrecognized writers, by a curious coincidence, during the six busy weeks before Christmas. The likeliest winners are the talk of Paris for weeks beforehand, newspapers publish tip sheets, breathless radio bulletins announce the event--and the books themselves sell anywhere from 50,000 to 500,000 copies, making them runaway bestsellers in France.

Biggest sale booster is the Prix Goncourt, oldest and most prestigious prize of all. This year it was won by Jacques Borel, 40, a Paris high school English teacher and translator of James Joyce. His novel, L'Adoration, was described by critics as somewhat Joycean in tone and weight--604 pages of stream of consciousness about a boy's love for his mother. Cracked Paris Match: "Other things being equal, it is often the most ponderous tome that wins." At $5.60 a copy, L'Adoration could earn its author the equivalent of four Nobel Prizes in royalties.

Nonwinners of the Goncourt have long maintained that the ten aging members of the 62-year-old Goncourt Academy, who are elected for life, are overly conservative. The juries awarding the three next most prestigious prizes try to be more avantgarde: witness, for example, this year's winner of the Prix Renaudot--a little nouveau roman called Les Choses (The Things). For 120 pages, it discusses the possessions of a young married couple. Explains Author Georges Perec, 29, an ex-parachutist, sociologist and amateur astrologer: "It brings something new, a necessary character, a quality which is anchored in our times."

So, apparently, does La Rhubarbe, by Rene-Victor Pilhes, 31, an advertising copywriter who won the Prix Medicis. In La Rhubarbe, the hero spends most of the book meditating under a rhubarb plant in his grandmother's garden, leaving it only long enough to seduce his stepmother. And the Prix Femina winner, Quelquun (Someone), by Robert Pinget, 46, concerns a nameless man who spends one day and 257 pages searching his house for a piece of paper. "One cannot say this is a bad book," wrote the weekly Arts, warily, "but at the end of this 'longest day,' the reader asks whether it was necessary to deploy such energy for so little profit?"

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