Last Fling

HEAVEN HAS No FAVORITES (302 pp.)--Erich Maria Remarque -- Harcourt, Brace & World ($4.50).

Ever since All Quiet on the Western Front, Erich Maria Remarque, 63, has probably made more out of death than the most fashionable undertakers. Mooning about death allows the author to pseudo-philosophize world-wearily on man's transitory state, enhances the characters' sense of the wonder of life, and gives a love affair the tang of teary urgency. Lillian and Clerfayte, the leading characters of his latest novel, have that kind of tangy affair. Lillian is a 24-year-old tuberculous patient in a Swiss Alpine sani-torium, and her X rays give her a possible year to live; Clerfayte is a middle-aging (40) racing driver with an addiction to danger and drink.

Their great, last-fling romance is unintentionally amusing since the high spots all seem to be haute couture and haute cuisine. She orders a batch of gowns from Balenciaga. He orders Dom Perignon 1934 and Chateau Lafite 1937 and takes her to dinner at Le Grand Vefour in Paris and other three-star restaurants in the Guide Michelin. When they look up from the menus, the lovers philosophize, ques-tion-and-answer fashion. She: "What are we, the bulls or the matadors?" He: "Always the bulls. But we think we're the matadors." As the lovers' time together grows short, the handkerchief scenes multiply, but Author Remarque coolly keeps his eye on the stop watch.

The novel is not merely a sentimental binge. Paris, Venice and the Riviera shimmer before the reader's eye like mirages evoked by Remarque's lovingly descriptive touch. And he has more than a trace of the gift that Cyril Connolly once noted in Hemingway of "saturating his books with the memory of physical pleasure, with sunshine and salt water, with food, wine and making love, and with the remorse which is the shadow of that sun." The trouble is that Remarque's sun is too often in eclipse.

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