Books: Dealer’s Choice?

COMPOSITION #1 by Marc Saporta. Unpaged. Simon & Schuster. $3.95.

It comes in a box. “The reader,” explain the instructions, “is requested to shuffle these pages like a pack of cards. The order the pages then assume will orient X’s life.” But who will orient the reader? For the pages are unnumbered, and X himself is never referred to except in the instructions. He does not speak. He is never described. He is an unmoved viewer of objective scenes into whose visions only the barest and rarest hints of emotion are allowed to creep—resignation at being yoked to Marianne, his mercilessly neurotic French wife; pain at the loss of Dagmar, his blonde German mistress.

What is surprising about French Neo-Realist Marc Saporta’s do-it-yourself novel—which by all logic should have been a boring nonbook—is that it turns out to be a provocative piece of literary gimcrackery. This is in large part due to Saporta’s skill at clicking off brisk, precise, sensuous sentences with the cool ease of a man spinning coins on a marble table. But it owes much to his use of the literary come-on. On one page, for example, Dagmar is seen standing next to a Christmas tree. “Through the tree’s branches,” writes Saporta, “Dagmar looks like one more fantastic toy . . . She is naked.” The page ends there. The reader—at least the male reader—turns expectantly to the next page. No Dagmar. And turn or shuffle as he will, he never gets to the other side of that Christmas tree.