Contemporary French fiction - at least as published in English translation - is still a matter of extremes, either primitive and naive, or coolly intellectual and self-regarding. This makes the contribution of the late Georges Perec (1936-82 ) all the more important. Author of Life: A User's Manual (Paris, 1978; London 1987), Perec demonstrated that it was possible for a French novelist to work within his country's intellectual tradition with unsentimental warmth and humaneness. After Perec's untimely death, the emergence of Jean Rouaud seemed to herald yet another significant development in French fiction.
In 1990 Rouaud, then 38, won the Prix Goncourt with Fields of Glory, his first novel. Not only was this the first time in forty years that a debut writer had won the prize, it was also an example of a French novel with an individual voice shaped by neither primitivism nor intellectual sophis tication. In that book Rouaud told the story of his family with a grace, elegance and maturity which defied, even concealed the careful - at times laboured - structure of the book. The narrative voice was understated and deliberate, the humour subtle. Within two years it was published in English, Ralph Manheim's last translation, completed shortly before his death.
Set on the French Atlantic coast, Rouaud's first novel opens with a vivid portrait of his eccentric grandfather and his adventures in his motor car, "the 2CV is the skull of a primate: windscreen eyes, radiator nose, sunshade eyebrows, engine prognathous jaw, while the roof equals the slightly convex parietal bones; nothing is lacking . . ." Even when the tone is at its most playful, at the heart of the book is the sudden death of his father at the age of 41. The impact of this death is symbolised by the slow decay of the narrator's Aunt Marie, a dedicated schoolteacher who, having eventually been forced to retire, sees her life now ebb away under this final loss. For all its personal history, Fields of Glory is above all the story of France at war, and of Rouaud's grandfather's war generation. By way of explaining the many tragedies Aunt Marie has suffered, the narrative embarks on a powerful meditation of the agonies endured in the trenches during the Great War. "We have never really listened to those elderly twenty-year-olds, whose testimony would help us to retrace the paths of horror . . ." Added to her grief is the mystery surrounding her brother's death at the front, and the whereabouts of his body.
Rouaud followed his haunting debut with Of Illustrious Men (Paris 1993; London 1995), which continues the story of his family. It is another gracefully circular, almost random narrative, this time centring on his father as a young man with a family of three. Joseph's gruelling work as a travelling salesman abruptly kills him, leaving the family in a permanent state of mourning. The oral quality of personal history recalled is balanced by exact detail and recreation of the mood of the moment. Fathers and sons is a theme which interests Rouaud deeply, and he writes about loss without becoming melodramatic.
On the strength of two small, subtle novels, both telling much the same story but telling it so beautifully, Rouaud has acquired a large and deserved reputation.
All of which makes his third book, The World More Or Less, translated by Barbara Wright (Harvill, £14.99 in UK), so disappointing. Although this book continues his family history, the ease and grace of his previous books has been replaced by a contrived, wryly self-deprecating, quasicomic tone which leaves the reader wondering if there a private joke hidden here somewhere. The story has switched to Rouaud and his short-sightedness, which is not quite the stuff of epic comedy, and certainly insufficient to base a novel on. "I who dread the company of men, whose conversations weary me, it was just my luck," he begins, "after eight years of strict boarding-school discipline (the only feminine presence being provided by three old nuns with adolescent moustaches), to find myself now among the members of the Logreean Club's reserve team, in the bleak rustic changing room erected alongside what you would have thought was a ploughed field, were it not for its chalk lines and goalposts." Should such an opening sentence fail to alert one to the problems which follow, don't worry, there are plenty more lying in wait in an overly long, utterly unfunny description of the narrator's footballing misadventures.
As before, Rouaud's approach to narrative is random, but now his tone has become more conversational, and the writing is discursive, and strains for effect. Having rambled on about football and his schooldays, he then returns to his strongest subject, death - with particular reference, of course, to his dead father. For the first of these sequences he exchanges his third-person voice for the secondperson. "So, without realising it, you become a kind of specialist in the mortuary domain. The moment anyone starts talking about death, burial, mourning, cemeteries, irreparable loss, inconsolable grief, eternal regrets, you prick up your ears: this is your department." When asked to write a school essay about a Sunday in the country, he decides to describe a visit to the graveyard. The subsequent account of the cemetery and the return to his boyhood is the most interesting in the book. Having dispensed with the gags, Rouaud recalls his father: "For his presence under the stone is very real. The proof of this is that as we approach, we lower our voices. We watch our words as we always used to when he was alive . . . Never swearing in his presence . . . If he still intimidates us, then it must mean that he isn't far away."
Most of the action concerns the narrator's poor eyesight, his developing interest in girls, a specific romantic interlude, and near-involvement in a 1960s offbeat movie. The World More or Less is jokey without being funny, more irritating than engaging, sloppily written and a poor companion to his two earlier works.
Jean Rouaud: death his strongest subject
