An accomplished, if slightly monotonous, portrayal of a self-justifying bourgeois who never understands how he mistreats his long-suffering wife, written in 1931 by the obscure French novelist (1898-1945), whose tautly controlled fiction has been credited as a major influence on Beckett. In fact, Keith Botsford's irascible 50-page Afterword, which makes the case for Bove as ""a writer for true readers,"" is considerably more interesting than Bove's rather hermetic novel.