Books: Who Is Sane?

RENDEZVOUS AT BRUGES (319 pp.)—Armand Lanoux—Putnam ($3.95).

This is a very American novel written by a Frenchman about Belgium. The U.S. note is insistently struck when Robert Drouin, a Paris TV producer, drives through an all-night snowstorm across a wide Flanders plain as featureless and flat as any Midwestern prairie. He asks directions at a roadside inn where huge transcontinental trucks cluster and the room rocks with the blare of a jukebox and the colored lights and clatter of pinball machines. Even the ancient, canal-veined city of Bruges, whose chimes and carillons sound like...