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Books: Pinched Minds

3 minute read
Martha Duffy

SALAD DAYS by Françoise Sagan

Translated by C.J. Richards

Dutton; 159 pages; $13.95

Pity the genre novelist who embarks on a different course. For more than 25 years, Françoise Sagan has published brief, ironic tales of love lost or betrayed. She is a supremely confident writer, both in her resolute economy of style and in her command of the milieu she describes: the frivolous, overwrought bourgeois society where emotion can be both teased and indulged.

This book, published in France four years ago, has a radically different setting the working-class world of a grim little town outside Lille, and the author has been lectured by French critics for attempting it. She borrowed the plot from a 1965 short story by Jean Hougron, who brought suit against her; Sagan won the case on appeal. The outline is familiar maybe even a bit hoary: Gueret, a downtrodden bookkeeper, despised by his bosses and his landlady, stumbles upon a cache of jewels. They were lost in the course of a murder, which Gueret did not commit but Mme. Biron, the landlady, thinks he did. She is a retired Marseille moll, and in her eyes Gueret’s bravado raises him from an irritating reminder of her reduced circumstances to a means of escaping from them.

She also develops a kind of grudging affection for him. He is an appalling bumpkin, young enough to be her son. Admitted to her favor, he abruptly falls in love with her. The bookkeeper celebrates his new ascendancy by lighting cigarettes Bogart-style and shaking his head in the worldly way of Edward G. Robinson. She rents a preposterous weekend apartment in Lille, where she and Gueret calculate their future in the Congo or Senegal, “two unlikely, hardworking lovers…planning for their years of triumph and luxury.” But Mme. Biron has also got in touch with an old gangster crony in Marseille to help her fence the jewels, and after that, reality takes a brutal measure of the couple’s dreams.

How the American publisher came up with a blithe title like Salad Days (the French title is Le Chien Couchant] for this predictable little morality tale is hard to figure out. Sagan is writing against her strength. She seems to have little access to these pinched minds, so that her customary grace notes—sly humor, sheer oddity—are rarely struck. But the story is told in sure-handed fashion, and it is flawlessly paced. Gueret at least is a convincing character, and the author takes an unexpectedly hearty interest in his clumsy pursuit of Mme. Biron. The French critics are doubtless right that this is second-class Sagan, but there is enough here to justify her exploring the low road for once. —By Martha Duffy

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