The Hour of the Hoo-Ha's

FIVE A.M. (173 pp.) -Jean Dutourd --Simon & Schuster ($3).

When you're alone in the middle of the night and you wake in a sweat and a hell of a fright When you're alone in the middle of the bed and you wake like someone hit you on the head You've had a cream of a nightmare dream and you've got the hoo-ha's coming to you . . . And perhaps you're alive And perhaps you're dead Hoo ha ha Hoo ha ha Hoo Hoo Hoo

-T. S. Eliot

The French mock hero of Five A.M. has a bad case of the hoo-ha's. His creator, Jean Dutourd. 36, is an accomplished satirical duelist (A Dog's Head, The Best Butter) who likes nothing better than to blood his pen on the foibles and pomposities of the French middleclass. He subscribes to the Andre Malraux dictum that France is "saturated with lies," and attacks those lies with what the French call "intellectual rigor." In Five A.M. this verges on intellectual rigor mortis, for Author Dutourd finds and leaves his novel's pathetic protagonist more dead than alive.

An Ax for Father. Fernand Gerard Doucin is a punctual insomniac who wakes promptly at 5 a.m. and gives his entire life an hour's third degree before lapsing back into troubled sleep. He often wakes in a sweat from a repetitive dream in which he bashes in his father's head with an ax. Like most of his dreams, this is quite out of keeping with Fernand's daytime self. By day he is a timid bank clerk with little hope and no desire for promotion, and equally small fears of being fired. He is dumpy, bald, 30 and a bachelor, and he keeps a once-a-week mistress who rather disgusts him as soon as he has made love to her.

Of course, nothing disgusts Fernand more than himself. 'His ruthless 5 a.m. self-analysis reveals a life as barren, lonely and pockmarked as the face of the moon. Fernand has lost all hope of heaven, but retains a superstitious fear of hell. His sole deity is the "phenobarbitone-God." Only two passions dominate him: laziness and cigarette smoking. He lies on his bed by the hour looking at the wall. Indeed, the only decision Novelist Dutourd puts to his hero in the whole course of this Novel is whether or not to get up and go to the bathroom. Fernand doesn't.

Dust for a Washout. Though he calls his own life a "washout," Fernand sees nothing better to envy in the lives of others. To him, ambition, love, fame, beauty, wealth are all illusions before the all-encompassing reality of death ("Dust is the messenger of God in the world")-"All is vanity" is not exactly a new philosophy, but it is a valid one. However, in Ecclesiastes it is a philosophy to live by, enhancing the precious value of life's passing moments. In Five A.M., it is interpreted as degrading life to the level of a futile, nihilistic charade. Author Dutourd writes as dry ice feels, but his chilling message is only half true. A man's lifetime is invariably more than the sum of what he thinks and Feels in the small, black hour of the hoo-ha's.

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