Broody Lady

L'AMANTE ANGLAISE by Marguerite Duras, translated by Barbara Bray. 122 pages. Grove Press. $3.95.

Marguerite Duras is generally considered one of the leading ladies in the new school of French experimental novelists. Some would say the leading lady --although it is hard to see why.

L'Amante Anglaise concerns a particularly squalid and brutal murder in a small provincial town: Claire Lannes kills her middleaged, deaf-mute cousin for no apparent reason, hacks up the body in a cellar and dumps the pieces from a railway bridge onto various passing trains. If there is one thing Madame Duras likes, it is a nice crime of passion, the bloodier the better. Shots, screams, strangled cries, murdered wives and jealous husbands recur in many of her stories, and so does a restless and tormented heroine. Claire Lannes is only the latest in a long line of broody ladies who are young no longer, neglected or betrayed by their husbands, obsessed with violent crime, ready to pick up the first available man.

The man is invariably of humble birth. He may be called the Demon Lover. In Ten-Thirty on a Summer Night, he is a Spanish workman on the run for killing his wife and her lover; he is rescued by the heroine in dramatic circumstances and fondly described as "her miracle, the storm murderer." In Moderate Cantabile, he is a French workman, again mysteriously connected with a recent murder, again with a sinister power over the heroine, who is frequently disturbed by "the silent agony of her loins." In L'Amante Anglaise, he turns up as the woodcutter Alfonso--an Italian this time--who sel dom speaks, lives alone in a hut in the forest, and is thought to know more about the murder than he will admit.

On Tape. To tell her sentimental and occasionally gruesome little stories, Duras uses all the fashionable techniques of the nouveau roman. Thus L'Amante Anglaise consists of three tape-recorded interviews conducted by an anonymous questioner and presented without comment, narrative or description. The first is an expository conversation with a cafe owner; in the second, Claire's husband Pierre gives his version of the crime; in the third, the murderess herself speaks. A typical session goes like this:

"Do you think she was unhappy?"

"No. She wasn't unhappy. What do you think?"

"1 don't think she was unhappy either. That's not the point."

"You're right. That's not the point."

Ask a silly question and you get a silly answer. If the reader is as persistent and as humorless as the anonymous interrogator, he gets 122 pages of very silly answers indeed.

It is precisely this kind of pretentious writing that has given the nouveau roman a bad name. Not that Duras need be so dull. She has a flair for describing violent action and an undoubted talent for inventing plots. It is simply that she is too ambitious for her fairly limited gifts.

Subtler Problems. L'Amante Anglaise has the makings of a perfectly good thriller. But Duras is not interested in anything so crude as whodunit. She is concerned with subtler problems, with the undercurrents and delicate nuances of emotion that underlie even the smallest action--in short, with questions that have no answers, or rather that have any number of answers. The snag is that when the characters are as boring, as predictable and unconvincing as Duras', it is difficult to work up much interest in their motives, let alone their delicate nuances. One is left in the end without either the pleasures of a detective story or the pleasures of an imaginative novel. "What will they do to her?" asks Pierre. "I don't know.

Does it worry you?" ''No, not really," he replies, and the reader is likely to agree with him.

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