Pascal Laine. Anais nue. Paris. Lattes. 1999. 196 pages. 114 F. isbn 2- 7096-1973-3.

Pascal Laine won a deserved Prix Goncourt for his novel La dentelliere in 1974, a work that became familiar to many in the United States because of Isabelle Huppert's exquisite performance in Claude Goretta's

film version, The Lacemaker. However, despite constant creativity since then, Laine has not really crossed the Atlantic to become known as a novelist with whom one must reckon. I doubt that his newest work will change the situation, though Anais nue is a novel that speaks about much that we find most problematic concerning our contemporary existence: how does one enter the world of degradation and humiliation that leads to prostitution and drug addiction?

The novel's narrator is an unnamed writer, and if the word roman were not on the cover, one might be tempted to see a kind of autobiographical tale in this disturbing narrative of how the author relives his past thanks to an accidental encounter with a former friend. The writer is going to the theater festival in Avignon, and an attendant who services his car turns out to be an old acquaintance, Vincent, who once lodged him in a sumptuous Parisian apartment in the seventies, when they and another friend shared the favors of the beautiful nymphet, Anais, a girl who never said no.

More precisely, the writer and the second friend shared her, but Vincent loved her too much to touch her. Narrating the love affairs of these young people, the first third of the novel is an evocation of the postsixties atmosphere in which students lived freely in communelike settings and stealing books from Maspero, the communist book dealer of the Latin Quarter, was part of the times. Anais is here portrayed as one of the drifting practitioners of free love that probably any Parisian reader over fifty may recall if she or he went to parties before AIDS destroyed such innocence.

But there is a very dark side to all this free copulation, and as the novel progresses, the reader begins to see, in retrospect, that Anais is a victim rather than a liberated new woman. Wounds on her body point to the degrading practices to which she lends herself: she hardly seems in control of her fate. The second third of the novel moves toward a recall of her past, as well as that of the two former friends, for it becomes apparent that Vincent has spent his entire existence trying to keep up with her and has come to know all about this young woman who once drifted into his life. The tone changes, and the reader now confronts a narrative that is evocative of something between the Marquis de Sade and some of Magritte's more somber fantasies as the narration tells of Anais's being used by elderly men for their perverse, if somewhat impotent, pleasures before she is turned into a virtual slave for a rich man who takes her from the school at which the headmaster had corrupted her. She is in effect converted into a sex zombie.

The final third of the novel narrates a much more contemporary tale of Anais's descent into prostitution and drug addiction. The narrative also becomes the tale of Vincent's absolute and totally ineffective passion for this woman. The narrator commiserates, is ironic, but finally has nothing to say about the absurdity of this account. There is something touching in this pathos, not unlike that of the scenes in Wim Wenders's film Paris, Texas in which the errant brother finds his lost love in a sex-shop window. Vincent has had the same experience, but he cannot stop trying to save Anais. However, his absolute passion was only useful when he was able to get Anais enough drugs so that she could kill herself.

Laine has written an exterior depiction of what it means to live one's life as a fiction once one finds oneself living the absurdly improbable - in this case the absurd fate of a proper young woman who is driven into a dream realm from which suicide is the only escape. The existentialist vision remains alive in Pascal Laine's work. It is probably too dark for a contemporary American audience, even if every large American city has its Anais standing on street corners.

Allen Thiher

University of Missouri, Columbia