Untruth in Packaging

By John Skow

MY REVOLUTION by Alex Karmel. 387 pages. McGraw-Hill. $10.

With nearly all the moral fastidiousness of an itinerant siding salesman, Alex Karmel bamboozles the reader into believing that the title page of his book means what it says. There seems no reason to doubt that My Revolution, Promenades in Paris 1789-1794 really is the diary of Restif de la Bretonne, author of The Pornographer, The Perverted Peasant, and Paris Nights. Restif was indeed a writer of the revolutionary period, a fascinating, talented lowlife who wrote some 200 books that mixed pornography and social criticism in roughly equal measure, and died in 1806 after Napoleon, oddly enough, gave him a job in the prefecture of police.

The historic side of the journal begins with a fine whiff of actuality. Restif chooses July 14th to oversleep and misses the storming of the Bastille. He meets the bloody-minded revolutionary Jean-Paul Marat, before Marat has any importance, and finds him horrifying. Later, someone shouts "Power to the people!"almost 200 years ago. What great luck, the reader thinks, that Karmel has unearthed the diary of a man as impressionable as Restif.

Actually, Restif wrote no diary during the terror. My Revolution is an exasperating dodge, deceptively mislabeled by the publishers. It was written entirely in 1969 by Alex Karmel, a novelist and an ex-Fulbright student in Paris. The book is exceptionable because the reader is led to think that Karmel's handmade wormholes are real. It is exasperating because as a historical novel it must be counted brilliant.

Karmel's Restif, splendid fellow, is not only a gossipist and eavesdropper but an aging whoremonger, moralist, printer and pamphleteer, skeptic, citizen, sentimentalist and night-prowling philosopher. He catches perfectly the queerness of the scene when he does reach the Bastille: "The fortress is being looted. From the high towers precious documents float down into the moat." He records the rainy grayness of Paris and the strange periods of calm when the Revolution catches its breath ("Most people lost interest . . . The price of bread continued to rise"). He sees the city's whores applaud a lynching "with their white hands, so expert at stimulating desire." He tries to turn his eyes away when a laughing mob drags a headless corpse from the Hotel de Ville, but he cannot.

What gives the book flesh and weight, however, is not local color. It is the lecherous old rationalist Restif, whose expert portrait by Karmel, in turn, reflects more of the spirit of revolutionary Paris than any neutral reportage is likely to do. Karmel nudges the reader once or twice too often to see parallels between Restif's Revolution and those of modern times. But he has superbly proved his boast that "this is the book Restif did not write but should have." All it lacks is a modest degree of "truth in packaging."

qedJohn Skow

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