PIG TALES
by Marie Darrieussecq
Pig Tales ($18.00; May 1997; 160 pp.; 1-56584-361-4): A major critical and popular success in France (``currently selling over 3,000 copies a day''), this thin Kafkaesque parable describes the gradual transformation of a young woman who works in a beauty parlor into a pig who sagely comments on her country's bland drift toward conservatism. The concept has keen satiric possibilities, and the details of the narrator's increasing gluttony and sexual rapacity are wittily imagined and presented. But there's not much novel here beyond the intriguing premise: It's a one-joke book.