Short Notices

THE FLOOD by J.M.G. Le Clezio. 300 pages. Afheneum. $5.95.

Not until page 45 of this vastly overpraised French novel does one learn that "this is the story of Franc,ois Besson." This forthright statement is doubly reassuring, because it has been preceded by a weird and frenzied surrealistic opener in which the world crazily assumes the aspect of a petrified urban forest, "a deserted planet, full of signs and booby traps."

One of the booby traps is that this is yet another one of those opaque novels of the tired "new wave" school. J.M.G. Le Clezio's writing is in turn dense and simple and occasionally brilliant. The ideas are old hat but earnestly pressed: God is dead, man lives simultaneously in an ugly asphalt jungle (outside) and an increasingly demented and purposeless state of mind (inside).

Take Franc,ois, a sort of negative hippie, a dropout from life. He has left his teaching job and lives aimlessly in a provincial city. His is a regimen of compulsive torpor in which nothing matters. He breaks up with his girl, vegetates, carelessly sets his room afire, goes pointlessly and without remorse to confession, commits a senseless murder, makes up lists of the names of cars that go by. His life is hallucinatory and also quite literally his hell.

There is no exit except to succumb to the flood of insanity. The book's real villain is the pointlessness of life, and in Paris literary circles this is a very fashionable villain indeed. Author Le Clezio, 27, frankly enjoys life himself--he is an ardent jazz and movie buff--but he is much too clever to let the fact seep into his books. If he had to choose a bedside volume, he says, it would be Alice in Wonderland. Perhaps Le Clezio should reread that work more closely. As Tweedledum remarked of Alice's weeping: "I hope you don't suppose those are real tears?"

THE MISSOLONGHI MANUSCRIPT by Frederic Prokosch. 338 pages. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $5.95.

If a novelist invented a character like Lord Byron, he would be set down as an opportunistic fictioneer with an eye on the bestseller list. Byron, after all, was almost too much. He was a good if not great poet; he was handsome; he could swim the Hellespont, even with a game leg; he had affairs with men as well as women including, some believe, his half sister. He was also a political rebel. When he died at 34 in Missolonghi, Greece, he was planning and financing a revolt against the Turkish oppressors.

This is the man whom Novelist Frederic Prokosch (The Seven Who Fled) tries to catch in undress. Normally an imaginative writer with considerable flair, Prokosch here employs the tired conceit that Byron left three notebooks at Missolonghi in which he reconstructed his life. As fiction, the book may appeal to those who want to see a flamboyant figure oscillate between homosexuality and heterosexuality with the nice indifference of a metronome. Prokosch uses all the four-letter words that his earlier elegance would have found quite supererogatory. Even more drearily, there is nothing new here about Byron. The hero's comments on love and life as rendered by the author fall into a tone of humdrum recital that makes one wonder if the Byron of Don Juan ever existed. He is better remembered in his own words:

Let us have wine and women, mirth and laughter,

Sermons and soda-water the day after.

There's nought, no doubt, so much the spirit calms

As rum and true religion.

THE CASSIOPEIA AFFAIR by Chloe Zerwick & Harrison Brown. 235 pages. Doubleday. $4.50.

Russia and China are exchanging ultimatums. The world is on the brink of a nuclear Armageddon. Then Scientist Maximilian Gaby's radio telescope picks up a message from outer space. It reveals that a highly intelligent race exists on an earthlike planet circling Cassiopeia 3579, a star some 30 light-years away. What's more, the folks up yonder are eager to communicate.

Electrified by Gaby's disclosure, the great powers on earth forget old antagonisms and focus their attention on the distant civilization, hoping to learn from it the secrets of peace and abundance. Alas, the path toward Cassiopeia--and utopia--is made virtually impassable by man's follies. Oppenheimer-like and Teller-like scientists have a falling-out, Advise and Consent politicians undermine each other, the authenticity of the Cassiopeia message is questioned, and the powers again turn toward holocaust. The disillusioned Gaby dies, unaware that he will eventually be vindicated by none other than the Chinese Communists.

What makes this novel interesting is that Co-Author Brown is a geochemist and one of the nation's most articulate and socially conscious scientists. Brown and his collaborator, Chloe Zerwick, a freelance writer, nearly obscure their message in a fog of literary and character cliches (notably missing from Brown's nonfiction writing). Still, their purpose is plain: they are not questioning the existence of extraterrestrial beings but asking if there is, after all, intelligent life on earth.

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