French Moral Tale

MONSIEUR PAUL (256 pp.) -- Henri Calet--Dutton ($3).

Decades of French fiction have pictured the Parisian husband as an amatory gymnast hopping gallantly from marital bedroom to illicit boudoir. In his sixth novel, and second book to be translated into English, Henri Calet gets a fresh camera angle on the old shot. His hero, a Parisian named Thomas Schumacher, is 40, greying and deadly tired of leading the fashionable double life. He is still rather fond of the wife he has just divorced, and has come to hate the mistress who is the mother of his infant son Paul. What with shuttling regularly between the two, tired Tom begins to feel that the bus is his only real home.

In Monsieur Paul, Tom puts down the story of his mistakes in a diary addressed to his son. Whether France's average Toms would recognize themselves in M. Schumacher's unprepossessing self-portrait is doubtful. The gist of his testimony seems to be that he would have avoided a lot of trouble if he had settled down to an honest job and an honest early marriage.

Tom got off to a bad start at the age of six, he decides in retrospect, when his own father ditched Tom's mother for a mistress. By his 20s, Tom is a self-assured young bachelor-businessman whose only known vice is fondling his secretary. Outside office hours, however, he has a mania for playing the horses, and it is not long before Tom taps the company till. He skips town one jump ahead of the law.

After a long, tinhorn odyssey in exile, Tom comes back to Paris and finds himself a wife. But boredom draws him into the arms of a mistress, who gives him excitement, trouble and baby Paul in short order, together with an urge to confess his shortcomings: "As for marks . . . zero, zero, zero--in conduct, in morality."

On fiction's report card, Monsieur Paul rates no top grades itself, but it has some virtues that more pretentious novels often lack. Author Calet writes a clean, colloquial prose in which he gets across his good-natured sympathy for his wayward hero. Working as close to his subject as a good bullfighter, he knows Tom's character and keeps it consistent. The diary and the novel end with Tom planning to run out on both his women and his son, but Author Calet explodes no moral dynamite under him. He seems to hope that son Paul will make a sounder job of his life, but he makes no predictions.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.