Guerard's 'Bystander' An Omelette Of Modern French Ironic Writers

The first page resembles Proust--what with tea-rooms, plumcakes, and the paste of sentiment. By page two, the narration switches to Gide's School of Sensitive Young Man Smelling Pressed Flower and Remembering Bath Tub Ring. There are three pages of Camus. And the rest of "The Bystander" slinks along in the ironic tradition of Colette and Francoise Sagan.

Albert Guerard has served up an omelette of Francophilia--and as a critical handbook on the limitations of his adopted style, his newest novel has a certain merit.

Its theme is the innocence of love and the frailty of innocence, exemplified by various scenes of life on the Rivera, in a one-room cold-water flat, behind the bushes of a country estate, and upstairs with the pimpled maid.

Down Into Squalor

Fifteen-year old Anthony ("writer, artist, translator, hack; gambler, sensualist, fool ... onlooker at his own ruin") spies Christine ("white tennis costume... dove gray fur jacket ... full of fun") in a tea-room, launching 18 years of unrequited love.

Anthony next meets Christine in a bar, 18 years later; he has "lowered myself, as by a rope" into squalor--the cobwebs and cracked plaster of bohemia, to find "reality." He is betrothed by a mixture of lust, masochism, and jealousy, to a teen-age chambermaid who occupies as many beds as she makes.

Benefactor

Christine has survived the years, two marriages, and a string of financed flings--and to Anthony appears the same. In the automatic magnetism and libidinous anarchy of the French, they become lovers. Only the shadow of Christine's "benefactor" darkens the happy idyll.

There is a little action, a climactic scene, Anthony's self-realization ("by means of self-betrayals," notes Guerard on the jacket cover), and his whipped-dog return to the chambermaid.

The Bystander is a slick novel, but its precision can't quite make up for the fact that a few things in this world do transpire outside the double-bed. The most effective scene is Anthony's gambling; the least effective are Anthony's introspective monologues. Some of the descriptive passages are pat and common coin from the American Weekly and the Advocate. The pages are littered with italicized French terms. Perhaps because the style is adopted, it is self-conscious. Guerard has the disturbing habit of affirming himself in the middle of a sentence with a superflous "yes."

Economy and Irony

The publishers and a number of critics have made much of the novel's "economy" of presentation. It is a strange economy, an economy which reduces the 18 years of squalor to a few paragraphs, and yet sends its protagonist back to the squalor as a pawn of Guerard's "reality." It is an economy which, when employed, too often fails to satisfy the curiosity; and which, in its lapses, overelaborates the same sort of sex affair people have confessed to in railroad club cars for a quarter-century.

burden to bear. The characters are not content to view each other ironically or come to an ironic realization of self; but Guerard himself is ironic about Anthony, and about reality. And the reader has to be somewhat ironic about Guerard.

Albert Guerard is a Harvard English professor, and those of us who listened to his tales of Gide and watched Conrad on the psychoanalytic couch may well contend that his place is at the podium, as a critic. Anthony might be a spectator at his own doom, but like most heroes in the Age of the Common Man, he is more tedious than tragic.