Books: Is It a Book? Is It a Nightmare?

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LA MAISON DE RENDEZVOUS, by Alain Robbe-Grillet. Translated by Richard Howard. 154 pages. Grove Press. $4.50.

Reading this novel by Alain Robbe-Grillet is a good deal like going to sleep with a stomachache: the night won't be comfortable, but there'll be some gaudy dreams. In his first book in six years, Robbe-Grillet's dreamy act turns round and round a series of tremulously ambiguous scenes set in Hong Kong. There is an American named Ralph Johnson who may really be a titled Englishman or even a Portuguese entrepreneur dealing in hashish, opium and girls. He attends, or thinks he attends, or the narrator thinks he attends, a party given by Lady Ava (or Eva or Eve or Jacqueline) Bergmann at a brothel—or possibly it is a figment of everyone's imagination.

So it goes. There is a grisly interlude about Kito, a little Japanese girl who performs a striptease in the "Su-Chuan manner," that is, with the help of a large black dog. Unfortunately, little Kito dies, or seems to die, from an overdose of an experimental drug, and her body is sold to be served with various sauces in a well-known Hong Kong restaurant. As the narrator puts it: "The Chinese cuisine has the advantage of making its contents unrecognizable."

One of the pioneers of France's New Novel—which is about a decade old now—Robbe-Grillet feels that nothing is so fatal to literature as a concern with "saying something." In his earlier and even more maddening works (The Voyeur, Jealousy), he regarded his characters as objects, and he has extended his experiments in the baffling abstract film scenarios for Last Year at Marienbad and L'Immortelle. "The world is neither significant nor absurd," says

Robbe-Grillet. "It is—quite simply." In his novels, Robbe-Grillet aims at a "certain ceremonious solidity, often slow-moving, with a theatrical sense which sometimes fixes the attitudes of characters in a rigidity of gestures, words and decor, recalling a statue or an opera." Finally, he tries to "construct a space and time purely mental, that of a dream or memory."

To some extent, La Maison de Rendezvous represents a change of direction for Robbe-Grillet: there is a plot of sorts, and there is even some introspection, usually shunned by the New Novelists. There is also a good deal of action, much of it repetitive, and several killings in addition to poor Kito's. But since no one can really agree on the identity of anyone else, it is difficult to discover who, if anyone, is dead, much less why. Readers who happen to be avid for the daytime retelling of last night's nightmare will find surfeit in La Maison; others are apt to hurl the book, if it is a book, at the wall.