Fools on the Brink

THE MIRACULOUS BARBER (248 pp.) --Marcel Ayme -- Harper ($3).

It is Paris in the uneasy spring of 1936. Sitdowns close the factories, riots clog the streets, a Popular Front cabinet maneuvers for its life. To a Jules Remains or a Jean Paul Sartre this is the ideal setting for a lugubrious social novel. But not to Marcel Ayme. As a satirist by profession --and currently the best in France--Ayme gives 1936 France his usual deft, dry treatment.

Like The Barkeep of Blemont (TIME, May 15), Ayme's sardonic jab at the Resistance movement, The Miraculous Barber insists that even in times of historical crisis men display their customary capacity for making fools of themselves.

Picture on the Wall. Ayme writes about two families, the solid upper-class Lasquins and the bohemian middle-class Ancelots. M. Lasquin, a hard-working industrialist, falls dead at lunch one day, between the trout and the duck with orange sauce. The death is rather ill-timed, for the workers at his factory are restive. Who can take his place there? His son-in-law Pierre is the natural candidate, but Pierre cares nothing for industry and responsibility, or, for that matter, for his pretty young wife, Micheline. Pierre dreams of being a track star, keeps a picture of the great runner Ladoumegue on his bedroom wall and, pointing to the picture, tells his frustrated wife every morning, "That's a real man."

Meanwhile, the rest of the family fiddle at their own futilities. Pierre's wife has a tepid flirtation; Mama Lasquin is pleasantly excited to discover that the departed Papa Lasquin has had a mistress; Papa's brother-in-law appropriates the mistress.

The Ancelots are lower down in the social scale, but just as disorganized. Papa Ancelot, a shoestring operator in the stock market, rails at his giddy daughters for going around with gigolos. But the daughters have found that they can distract Papa from his tirades by pushing him into the receptive arms of the housemaid. Mama and daughters work up fervors over Russian films, talk yearningly about the coming French revolution. One daughter guesses that 500,000 heads will fall. "I find [the idea] breathtakingly pure," replies Mama Ancelot.

Fingers in the Air. In surface contrast to these two families, Ayme brings in his barber, a self-satisfied sage who gives advice, in the name of France, to cabinet ministers after hours. "The Frenchman's got no use for revolutions," the barber says in one pronouncement. "What the Frenchman wants is to earn a comfortable living, eat well, drink well and enjoy himself." But the cream of Author Ayme's jest is that his barber, his symbolic natural wise man, is a fool himself.

The barber's head, in fact, is a windy forum through which all the conflicting ideas of prewar France chase each other, one after another. His final word of reassurance on the French General Staff: "While we were having a drink I noticed they all held their little fingers in the air, quite separate from the rest. A mere detail, you will say. Agreed, but it's by small signs of that kind that one knows the best people."

The Miraculous Barber is a sharp-edged piece of satire, yet something is missing. Author Ayme once said that in his work he tried to achieve two emotions, humor and pity. The humor is there in abundance, but the pity is hard to find.

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