World More or Less: A Novel by Jean Rouaud; Barbara Wright

A haunting story about growing up by acclaimed French author Jean Rouaud. As a young man, the writer is myopic, dreamy, lonely, grieving the deaths of his father and grandfather and seeking to bring the confusions of adolescence into focus. Sharing his more-or-less world are Theo and Gyf, lover and friend, one for whom life is mystery, the other who wants to frame it in a camera lens.

Having re-created the WWI generation of his grandfather in the Prix Goncourt-winning Fields of Glory, and having told his father's poignant story in Of Illustrious Men, Rouaud now turns to his own coming-of-age in this sequel, with decidedly less success. For his portrait of the artist, Rouaud returns to two distinct moments: his eight-year internment at the Saint-Cosmes all-boys boarding school, and his student years during the late 1960s. As a boy, his narrator is a myopic loner, mourning his dead grandfather and father, forced to endure cruel teachers (one paper is returned marked up in red corrections like "blood flowing on the back of an animal pierced by banderillas"). Still obsessed at 18 with his idol, Rimbaud, our narrator is overjoyed to rediscover his subversive boarding-school buddy, Gyf, who now wears cool glasses and manages to attract beautiful girls. But Rouaud fails to put his youth into context. Despite the novel's pervasive, thinly ironized nostalgia, he omits the background detail about his family that so enriched his previous novels. Few readers who come to this work cold will be seduced by Rouaud's glib prose, which is unflatteringly translated by Wright and littered with Rimbaudian mock jargon, pretentious allusions ("after Cerberus has put out his nightlight"; "nothing you can do to stem the Tethys of tears") and second-person passages that seem, more than anything else, a sign of their author's self-absorption.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

An excess of navel-gazing weakens this otherwise highly appealing portrait of the artist through boyhood and adolescence, which completes an autobiographical trilogy (begun with the Prix Goncourtwinning Fields of Glory, 1992, and continued in Of Illustrious Men, 1994). Rouaud's previous novels celebrated his grandfather's and father's lives respectively, and a strong sense of the claims of family likewise hovers about the edges of this appropriately more buoyant story (narrated by its unnamed protagonist) of school days, first love, and a dawning awareness of its hero's vocation. It unwisely begins, though, with an extremely attenuated impressionistic account of (for convenience, let's say) Rouaud's awkward participation in team sports and unhappy tenure at Sainte- Cosmes, a Catholic boarding school (amusingly labelled a ``Cassock- clad menagerie''). The lyrical and introspective style (beautifully translated) strikes many exquisite chords, but every particular of this preternaturally observant boy's environment is scrutinized so relentlessly that the novel moves at an escargot's pace. Its narrative logic does provide helpful structuring: An essay assignment stimulates Rouaud's memories of his family's cemetery visits to honor its numerous dead; his attempts to play the guitar lead into a moving meditation on his grandmother's memories of her late husband's musical talents. There are charming characterizations of an older friend ``Gyi'' (Georges-Yves), the school's chief iconoclast and lord of misrule as well as a relentlessly avant-garde filmmaker; and of Theo, a moody beauty who gives the young narrator his first experience of romantic confusion, ecstasy, and heartbreak. Rouaud is disarmingly forthright about his own naive idealism, and he skillfully solicits our empathy for ``the little guy with the asymmetrical glasses'' who matures--quite convincingly--before our eyes. It's both Rouaud's strength and limitation that his exclusive subject (identified here as his ``myopia'') appears to be his family and himself. The so-called trilogy may be completed, but one expects the story to continue. -- Copyright ©1998, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

In his trilogy's first two volumes, Rouaud celebrated his grandfather and the World War I era (Fields of Glory, 1992, winner of the 1990 Prix Goncourt) and his father's life as salesman, citizen of a small Loire Valley village, and, during World War II, member of the French Resistance (Of Illustrious Men, 1994). The World More or Less is the author's own bildungsroman, a tale of a myopic adolescent outsider, fatherless thanks to the tragically early death of his father, coping with the issues of values and identity, destiny and choice, friendship and love that confront teens in all eras. For a young man who should wear glasses, vision is a dominant concern: sometimes reinforcing, sometimes overwhelming the self-doubt inherent in youth (especially in the mid-sixties, the author-narrator's adolescence). An unathletic young man's rare sports success; first love (a schoolmate's sister) and first lover; multiyear friendship boarding-school companions; writing fiction and playing the violin: these are major elements of one young man's vividly described journey to adulthood. Mary Carroll