Vanishing France, by John L. Hess (Quadrangle, 164 pp., illus., $12.50). This is actually two books—a warm collection of “color” pieces on French life, politics, and history originally written by Mr. Hess for the New York Times, and a really splendid selection of black and white photographs of “old” France by Harold Chapman, sometimes unrelated to the text but always thoroughly enjoyable in their own right. Here are the French people in all their charm, oddness, shabbiness, and inexhaustible self-satisfaction; marketing, squabbling, eating, drinking, rioting, romancing, and surviving as distinctively Gallic despite the post-war barrage of non-French innovation now cluttering their everyday lives. The faces in the pictures justify the book by themselves. My favorites include a village tuba player (page 140) who bears an uncanny resemblance to both Groucho Marx and Professor Sidney Hook; a fetching if slightly shopworn streetwalker being ogled by two gendarmes who must not have realized that they were on camera (page 111); and a visual evocation of the generation gap built around two street benches, one occupied by stolid old peasant loungers, the other by a group of long-haired teenagers in sleazy modern garb (page 29). Mr. Hess’s text is generally good and at its best when dealing with humorous French trivia such as the Common Market mini-crisis over defining sauce Bearnaise, or powerful emotional events like de Gaulle’s theatrically simple burial—to his own detailed specifications—at Colombey-les-Deux-Eglises. aram bakshian jr.
Three Wogs and “Theroux Metaphrastes: An Essay on Literature,” by Alexander Theroux (Godine, 250 pp., paper, $3.95). As Enoch Powell xenophobically points out, with the dissolution of the Empire, England has developed a “colored problem.” “ ‘Wogs, pack it off,’ ” Roland McGuffey, Theroux’s Houndsditch toff, suggests on an underground wall, crudely verbalizing a sentiment shared by more Englishmen than the Home Office would admit. Of course, the wogs in Theroux’s tripartite novel win—Theroux being one himself, after all. The comfortably bourgeois Mrs. Proby is poisoned-pea shot by Mr. Yunnum Fun, the Chinese grocer; the prole Roland is parabled to paralysis by Dilip, the mystical Indian electrical engineer; the fruitily aristocratic Reverend Which Therefore loses his love, African Cyril, to Anita the ballerina, by the connivance of his mama, Lady Therefore. Therefore, one concludes that, because of their bigotry, the lower classes will be undone, whereas the upper class will undo itself. But the real upshot of the novel’s three racial-sexual-verbal battles is that “their how is not our how, nor ours, theirs.” Happily, Theroux’s “how” differs radically from the methods favored by our stiff-lipped, post-Hemingway generation of writers. In the essay “Theroux Metaphrastes,” he declares he has “a very amplified prose style.” Indeed, his range reaches from base Hyde Park Corner harangue to highly polished periods. His evocation of a desolate London Sunday, for example, is eerie in its exactness. In contrast, his description of a ladies’ pub lunch is outrageously funny. Three Wogs is an excellent first novel. Moreover, it’s a jolly good book. Both Anglophile and Anglophobe should read it. rosa cumare
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