Books: The Second Sex Revisited

The Second Sex Revisited LES BELLES IMAGES by Simone de Beauvoir. 224 pages. Putnam. $4.95.

When Simone de Beauvoir (The Second Sex) casts her cold, existentialist eye on the predicament of modern woman, the author emerges like a tough-minded, hardhearted Fransoise Sagan. Les Belles Images has sold over 100,000 copies in France for reasons that have nothing to do with the art of fiction. In its brief compass (long enough to irritate, short enough to finish between lunch and cocktails), the novel lambastes modern life, love, marriage and values with thoroughgoing cynicism. It is bound to have an insidious appeal: it can make a woman wallow in self-pity. The scene is a Paris rapidly becoming Americanized. The heroine is Laurence, the ultramodern career woman (advertising, of course) with a successful architect husband, two sweet little girls, and a lover always on tap (chap who works in her office). She is suffocating in a sea of materialism, false standards and social hypocrisy. Security is a cocoon. The sorrows of the world must not intrude; her sensitive eldest daughter must not be made aware that there is cruelty and hunger in the world.

Laurence’s bold advertising copy is a lie too—a slick attempt to sell merchandise by creating illusions of spurious wellbeing. As for her husband’s building developments, they represent nothing but built-in, functional ugliness. As a man, she concludes, he is just another cipher, an interchangeable part (“Why him rather than anyone else?”).

Laurence has other troubles. Mother, a hard-bitten success herself, is about to lose her 56-year-old lover to a 19-year-old girl. Father, a charming bookworm with a sense of history, seems like the only decent refuge, the one who places truth and integrity above success and money. Even Laurence’s once sweet adultery now seems merely “functionalism.” Small wonder that she is heading toward a crackup.

All the outward affluence and fake wellbeing, says Author de Beauvoir, are the worst kind of illusion; reality is bile. Yet on the very last page, there seems to be a smidgen of vague hope, at least for the children—maybe. That is small compensation for a novel that is distinguished otherwise only for its predictable course and Gallic ennui.