Novels by the Hundred

DESTINATIONS (320 pp.) -- Georges Simenon--Doubleday ($3.95).

What is a simenon? Most literate Europeans can give the answer, but a lot of U.S. readers would hate to have it thrown at them as the $64,000 question. A simenon is a novel written by Belgian-born Georges Simenon. No one knows how many simenons there are, least of all Author Simenon himself, but the total cannot be far from 400, and the man who is responsible for them all cannot even remember how he ended his first book, written at 16.

In the U.S., Simenon is best known as the creator of pipe-smoking Inspector Maigret, the kindly, plodding and vaguely troubled French detective. But the keenest Simenon fans have long since stopped thinking of him as a mere mystery writer or even as a literary psychologist. To them he is a real novelist with a special view of life that is instantly conjured up in their minds by the simple mention of his name.

Hard & Half-Hard. The last two sim nons to reach the U.S. are published to gether in a single volume called Destinations. One of them, The Burial of Monsieur Bouvet, is a mixture of detection, mood and Paris atmosphere that gets under way when an elderly gentleman drops dead at a Paris bookstall. Since the author is more interested in the frayed lives and barely concealed despairs of his characters than in the mystery, he calls it a "half-hard," i.e., half-serious novel.

Actually, in spite of some nice evocative writing about Paris and Paris types, it is only half there.

The other story, The Hitchhiker, is a "hard" novel, serious all the way. From it the U.S. reader can tell pretty definitely, and at one sitting, whether or not he wants to add the word simenon to his vocabulary. The scene is New York and New England, and Hero Steve Hogan has the same basic trouble as most Simenon heroes: life and the world have beaten him down into a confused, resentful wretch in whom something has to give. He has a pretty wife who works and of whom he is a little jealous, two kids away at camp in Maine, a dreary Madison Avenue job, a small house in the suburbs loaded down with mortgage. Weak on the inside and plodding on the outside, Steve has been hitting the bottle. Afraid that his wife is low-rating him, he blurts: "There wouldn't be anything the matter with me if you didn't treat me like a worm . . . I'd like to get a little outside everyday life!"

All this sounds like the stuff of any one of a hundred novels at the local lending library. But Simenon does not see Steve just as a man in a grey flannel suit. Rather, he is the unwilling wearer of a hair shirt imposed on him by a world he never made and is too weak to remake. Soon enough Steve gets a little outside ordinary life. On an auto trip to Maine with Nancy to pick up their children at camp, he gets drunk and Nancy leaves him to go on by bus. When Steve picks up a hunted criminal, he sees in him only the man who had the guts to lash back at life. In an ending that mixes brutality with insights, Steve gets his trolley back on the tracks, but not before Simenon has made ordinary lives seem to be at the mercy of extraordinary tensions. True Simenon fans will probably regret the hopeful last page, but even in life shock treatments sometimes work.

In 100 Years. Like all simenons. these novels were written at incredible speed and sometimes show it. Simenon's working method is simple. He writes a chapter a day for ten or eleven days, and then he has a novel. He has written one in as little as 25 hours, gets edgy if it takes as long as two weeks. He seldom has a plot or a story in mind when he starts, but his thinking keeps up with the machine-gun speed of his typewriter once he begins. Disparagingly he has said: "I write fast because I do not have the brains to write slow." But he does believe there is no reason why fast writing has to be bad writing. Now 52, he has left the U.S., where he lived for ten years, to return to France. A rich man, he hopes to live to be a hundred and to go on producing until the end.

A serious critic has declared: "In a hundred years' time Simenon will probably be called one of the most far-sighted writers of our age." Simenon. however, lives and writes according to the advice he once handed to his sons: "Live joyously and be very careful not to take yourselves too seriously."

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