CRUSH

Like the worst—most?—of its kind, Baume's ``novel'' is psychologically little more than a very thin string whose purpose is to allow knots—scenes, that is, of real dirty sex—to be tied at intervals on its length. Parisian AmÇlie is 30, David 50. AmÇlie is married with children, David recently divorced. Don't expect to hear more than a word or two of David's earlier domestic life; and of AmÇlie's current one only the news once and again (and again, and again) that husband and daughters are out of town, away on business, in the country, or visiting the US. In a handful of excruciatingly artificial opening pages, the lovers-to-be meet trÇs cute on a Paris street where David (a filmmaker) is doing a shoot. Story? There will be sex in David's apartment, sex on a trip to Marrakech, sex in David's apartment, sex in David's office, sex in David's (he's so successful) country estate—where the affair begins to cool as it gradually becomes clear that David is a cold fish (``I've got to trim some shrubs. You don't mind, do you?''), finally allowing AmÇlie to start over again with somebody else. Not much there, although the abysmally translated novel in the meantime provides a good supply of entertainment both verbal and dramatic: ``Right now, here? AmÇlie sounded disconcerted.'' ``He was moving deliberately slowly, but AmÇlie remained tight as a clam.'' AmÇlie, says one page, ``had David on the brain,'' while the next explains presciently that she ``realized that her mind was a void.'' There is, yes, sex, sex sex- -``AmÇlie moaned as his dick rubbed the walls of her cunt''—though at times it gets rather alarmingly out of control: ``Emerging from orgasm, AmÇlie was astonished, as she always was, by the way her shuddering cunt took possession of her entire body before beating a hasty retreat.'' Shallow, ill done, absurd.