Skill without Warmth

The Elizabeth of Henri Troyat’s new novel (Elizabeth, Simon and Schuster, $4.95) is the daughter of Amelie (Amelie in Love and Amelie and Pierre). She is ten years old when the story begins, and she is not yet eleven When it ends. There is in Elizabeth something of most other young girls in fiction. There is something of Colette’s Claudine, if you like. And if you like, there is enough of any other real girl in Elizabeth to make Elizabeth a lot like any other real girl. In a mild sort of way, I do like.

I like Elizabeth (the book) principally because Troyat goes from cliche to cliché with unruffled calm, which is a test of the writer’s truth. In spite of the unusual background of his heroine—the shell-shocked, income-netent father, the atmosphere of a Montmartre café existence that leaves the parents little time for their daughter-Elizabeth proceeds from one common little-girl misfortune to another, punctuated with the surprises and mystifications and glowing moments that are the substance of child-life. She is in bad health. She gets sent away to a forbidding school in the country. She finds herself unpopular. She discovers a friend. The friend catches cold. The friend dies. Sob. Elizabeth herself catches cold. Oh, no! She almost dies. She does not die. She emerges, instead, a heroine, and when she leaves the school she finds herself taken into the family of her mother’s cousins and educated at the boys’ school run by them. Here a series of other adventures begin, and we seem to be only halfway through the complications when the book ends.

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Peter Crumpet

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The Elizabeth of Henri Troyat’s new novel (Elizabeth, Simon and Schuster, $4.95) is the daughter of Amelie (Amelie in Love and Amelie and Pierre). She is ten years old when the story begins, and she is not yet eleven When it ends. There is in Elizabeth something of most other young girls in fiction. There is something of Colette’s Claudine, if you like. And if you like, there is enough of any other real girl in Elizabeth to make Elizabeth a lot like any other real girl. In a mild sort of way, I do like.

I like Elizabeth (the book) principally because Troyat goes from cliche to cliché with unruffled calm, which is a test of the writer’s truth. In spite of the unusual background of his heroine—the shell-shocked, income-netent father, the atmosphere of a Montmartre café existence that leaves the parents little time for their daughter-Elizabeth proceeds from one common little-girl misfortune to another, punctuated with the surprises and mystifications and glowing moments that are the substance of child-life. She is in bad health. She gets sent away to a forbidding school in the country. She finds herself unpopular. She discovers a friend. The friend catches cold. The friend dies. Sob. Elizabeth herself catches cold. Oh, no! She almost dies. She does not die. She emerges, instead, a heroine, and when she leaves the school she finds herself taken into the family of her mother’s cousins and educated at the boys’ school run by them. Here a series of other adventures begin, and we seem to be only halfway through the complications when the book ends.