A Double Life.

A Double Life * Frederic Raphael * Catbird Press * $24

In an age when fiction fairly skips across the page--or, God help us, the computer screen--it is a blessing, albeit a mixed one, to encounter a novel so rich and complex and dense as Frederic Raphael's A Double Life. It demands; of readers powers of concentration not usually called for these days, plus a working knowledge of the French character and intellectual history, particularly the unpleasant part during World War II when France was occupied by the Germans. Weighty stuff, to be certain. But it is Raphael's genius to add the sexual context, which, as usual, makes all the difference.

The hook for the gay reader is the repressed homosexuality of our hero, Guy de Roumegouse. His sexual situation as the book begins is a complicated one. He has been married twice and frequents female prostitutes. Nevertheless, every action of his present-day life is still branded by a series of relationships--mostly tortured and unconsummated and racked by betrayal--that he had with young men during the war. And while his present-day life might almost pass as light comedy, the Resistance period is anything but; it's angry, cruel, yet often sexually stimulating in an uncomfortable sort of way. Raphael, who wrote the edgy, sexy script for John Schlesinger's 1965 film Darling, also was Stanley Kubrick's cowriter on the screenplay for Eyes Wide Shut. And while the stakes are higher in this novel, A Double Life has much of the same elegant, haute bourgeois atmosphere where sex and love have become so complicated they're on the verge of turning ugly, sometimes comically, sometimes tragically, sometimes both.

Like the sexual fetishes that crop up on its pages, A Double Life is a matter of taste. If you like your novels full of European intellectual thought laced with intricate psychological insight all wrapped up in a pseudo-Nabokovian narrative, it's heaven. If you don't, you're likely to find your eyes wide shut.