Books: Voyage of Beautiful People

THE PAINTED LADY by Françoise Sagan

Translated by Lee Fahnestock; E.P. Button; 468 pages; $15.95

It was 29 years ago that Bonjour Tristesse, a short novel by an 18-year-old schoolgirl, Françoise Sagan, sold a record-breaking 1.5 million copies in France. Translations soon topped bestseller lists throughout Europe and in the U.S. A tale of worldly intrigue and adolescent sex, the book caught the public fancy as much for the author's precocious sophistication as for her fine-grained, sensuous prose style. Since then, literary fashions, linguistic games and critical theories have reduced much of French fiction to an esoteric art, impermeable to the intellect, oppressive to the spirit and absolutely no fun to read.

Meanwhile, Sagan has remained imperturbably on course, charting the manners of France's Beautiful People who inhabit the milieu of high fashion, advertising and show business. Those of her novels that appeared in the U.S., such as A Certain Smile, Aimez-Vous Brahms? and The Unmade Bed, came across as high-class pop fiction à la française with predictable complements of cuckolds, betrayed mistresses and golden-eyed lovers.

Still, she could not easily be dismissed as France's Jacqueline Susann. Stylistically, her descriptive powers were a match for her formidable perceptions. The pity was, went the critical chorus, that she wasted her talent on such trivial themes and frivolous characters. That argument reflected the reverse snobbism of intellectuals who were unwilling to grant that the rich and the worldly were worthy of a novelist's attention, as if there had been no Proust. Sagan defended herself: "I have always made my characters belong to the same social group, out of decency. I've never known poverty; I don't see why I should try to make a living talking about social problems I've never experienced and know nothing about."

Criticism of her fiction stepped up after 1972, when Sagan reportedly began battling spells of illness, and her novels grew skimpier and more vulnerable to attack. In 1981 she was devastated when a French court banned her twelfth novel, a 178-page crime story called Le Chien Couchant (The Setter), on the ground that it was an "illicit reproduction" of a short story by another writer. The ban was later reversed on appeal.

Thus her 13th novel, The Painted Lady, wrought out of a decade of travail, long silences and undoubted artistic growth, comes as a reassuring surprise. A tale of loves won and lost on a ten-day Mediterranean cruise, The Painted Lady is more than entertaining; its verve and humor disguise a serious work. Sagan's cruise has a musical motif; the deluxe passengers have each paid $15,000 to listen to a virtuoso pianist and a celebrated diva perform aboard a ship pointedly christened Narcissus. The lure is also gastronomical: "The port of call determined the musical work, and the musical work determined the menu. These delicate musical relationships, hesitant at first, had bit by bit been transformed into invariable ritual, even if it occasionally happened that the sudden decay of a tournedos necessitated the replacement of Rossini by Mahler, and the tournedos by a Bavarian pot roast."