Books: Provincial Passions

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RESIDENTIAL QUARTER—Louis Aragon —Harcourf, Brace ($2.50).

The wickedness of Paris has been a preoccupation of French novelists ever since Rabelais. But if the new generation of French novelists is to be trusted, Paris is austere compared with the provinces. In books like Guilloux's Bitter Victory, Romains' The Proud and the Meek, the small cities of the Republic seethe with vice, scandal, adultery, perversion that are all the more conspicuous because of the peaceful calm of the surrounding countryside. In Residential Quarter, Louis Aragon, continuing the panoramic novel he began last year in The Bells of Basel, gives the most lurid picture of provincial passion thus far.

Although the second half of the novel pictures big-time corruption in Paris, complete with blackmailers, international financiers and gamblers, it is less convincing than the early chapters laid in a little town near Marseille. There the mayor's 16-year-old son is having an affair with the wife of the tax collector, as is the local doctor; the dealer in funeral wreaths is embracing his wife's maid, who is also having an affair with the son of a schoolteacher, who, in turn, is mixed up with the nymphomaniac daughter of the owner of the local chocolate factory. Although a sombre political note runs through all these complex relationships, the political confusions are less interesting than the amorous ones, and the passions unleashed are well-nigh sufficient to explain the disasters that have since overtaken France.