Ways of Love

A SPORT AND A PASTIME by James Salter. 191 pages. Doub/eday. $4.50.

France's no-longer-new New Novelists have found few imitators in the U.S. James Salter, 40, is one of the exceptions. His model seems to be Alain Robbe-Grillet, who labors in his books to "construct a space and time purely mental, that of a dream or memory." Perhaps in tribute, Salter sets his third book in France. His subject is the love affair between Anne-Marie Costallat, an 18-year-old who looks like a child but eats like a dock hand, and young Phillip Dean, a Yale dropout who has been wandering through Europe with "that touch of indolence and occasional luxury that comes only from having real resources."

The affair is viewed, or rather voyeured, by an unnamed narrator. In the hazy New-Novel fashion, the exact locale is uncertain: it may be Autun, or it may be Auxerre. And the events described may have happened or they may have been invented. As the narrator puts it: "I see myself as an agent provocateur or a double agent, first on one side--that of truth--and then on the other."

He is also a shadowless personality, inept in his love life. Thus, to compensate for his own inadequacies, he exaggerates Dean's qualities almost to the point of inventing a new character; he fears his creation as he must fear "all men who are successful in love."

This curiously distilled method of storytelling proves effective and makes something lyrical of a rather commonplace romance. Dream-walking, the reader follows the narrator and his lovers through a lightly perfumed garden of erotic nuances. The encounters of Dean and Anne-Marie seem to require not reading but sensing, as if the touch of the eye were almost too much for reality. And when at last the dream breaks, it is not with a shatter but a silent splintering of crystal fragments.

A West Pointer who served twelve years in the U.S. Air Force, Salter came late to fiction. "I was not always a writer," he says, "but perhaps I was always becoming one." There are bestselling novelists who could learn from this cool and quiet book.

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