Nostalgia for Parents

Amelie In Love, by Henri Troyat. Translated from the French by Lily Duplaix. 370 pp. New York: Simon and Schuster. $4.50

Since Balzac, the French have been our sturdiest masters of the chronicle novel, the tortoise of literary forms, which usually takes a dozen or so mosaic volumes to portray an entire epoch in terms of one or more of its characteristic families. Before the war, we had Martin du Gard’s Thibaults, and Duhamel’s Pasquiers, not to mention any number of Romains’ men of good will. Now comes the prolific Henri Troyat with a project called “The Seed and the Fruit,” which promises to serialize the past forty years of a lower-middle-class French family, and of which Amelie in Love is the charming first installment.

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Robert Phelps

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Amelie In Love, by Henri Troyat. Translated from the French by Lily Duplaix. 370 pp. New York: Simon and Schuster. $4.50

Since Balzac, the French have been our sturdiest masters of the chronicle novel, the tortoise of literary forms, which usually takes a dozen or so mosaic volumes to portray an entire epoch in terms of one or more of its characteristic families. Before the war, we had Martin du Gard’s Thibaults, and Duhamel’s Pasquiers, not to mention any number of Romains’ men of good will. Now comes the prolific Henri Troyat with a project called “The Seed and the Fruit,” which promises to serialize the past forty years of a lower-middle-class French family, and of which Amelie in Love is the charming first installment.