Books: Watered Whine

MOBILE by Michel Bufor. 319 pages. Simon & Schuster. $6.

As it has with many another traveler before him, being a tourist brought out the worst in Michel Butor. A gifted disciple of French antinovelist Alain Robbe-Grillet (TIME, July 20, 1962), Butor is notable because he uses a different technique with every book and turns out intense and interesting fiction just the same. But in recounting his recent six-month tour of the U.S.—and in switching from novels to what might loosely be called nonfiction—Butor has produced a whopping-bad nonbook. It presents America in a nightmarish jumble of road signs, city names, ornithological notes and grim historical oddments all strung together in a style that at its best suggests E. E. Cummings and John Dos Passes at their worst:

The planes leaving for Tokyo . . . The ships sailing for Liverpool.

The garbage floating in the water The Empire State Building: 1,860

steps to the 102nd floor . . .

DIXON, WYOMING, Far West

They say they've found gold!

Bighorn National Forest.

A rustle of leaves in the wind.

BUFFALO . . .

ca-Cola,

si-Cola

Clic

Clac

What?

nothing

The slender pejorative burden of Butor's book is contained in interwoven excerpts from a terrifying Salem witch trial, historical notes on the ill-treatment of American Indians, liberal quotes from the prospectus of Freedomland, U.S.A., and offerings from the views of various Southerners (real and imagined) on the Negro. Among them is one from that conscientious democrat Thomas Jefferson, who concluded, ". . . their inferiority is not the effect, merely, of their condition of life."

Butor's crime is not his adverse opinion of the U.S: It is that he has done what no honest Frenchman should do —watered his whine. Mobile outrageously pads about 20 pages of real reporting and social commentary into a 319-page, $6 book.