Texaco.

THIS book, written by a Frenchman from Martinique, has been translated into 14 languages and has received extravagant praise all over Europe. The New York Times put it on the cover of its Sunday book review. The next day, a Times reviewer announced that Texaco "marks the advent on these shores of a remarkable writer. This is a book that signals discovery!"

So I was perhaps more surprised than I should have been to find Texaco ponderous, self-indulgent, and overwhelmingly mediocre. Of course whenever a reviewer goes on about "lush" descriptions, or "prose saturated in bemused gorgeousness," your critical alarm bells should go off. What he is really saying is: don't expect a strong plot; this is contemporary literary fiction -- it's all about description and atmosphere. Mere storytelling, why that is for the common herd, for the readers of romance novels, mysteries, science fiction, and that lowest of all genres, the technothriller. (Forgive my dropping into French rhythms, but there is something very French about this sort of elitism.)

Texaco is not a terrible book. But getting through the first third was like watching paint dry. So why all the fuss? Texaco is just second- or third-rate magical realism -- one of many unfortunate imitations spawned by the success of Gabriel Garcia Marquez's great Hundred Years of Solitude. Chamoiseau is not only no Garcia Marquez, he's not even a Rushdie. What the Times calls "unexpected juxtapositions" are just failed metaphors, the sort of thing that might be attempted by a pretentious college sophomore.

The book's success in France is understandable for two reasons. First of all, the French have failed to produce any good novelists since the war. The novel itself -- despite triumphs in the last century -- is now a form that has slipped into their cultural blindspot. As with rock 'n' roll, they really cannot tell the good from the bad, the lame from the cool, and so have almost no chance of producing high-quality work themselves. Secondly, the French have a rather patronizing predilection for the "exotic." And the fact that this author is black, fluent in Creole, and yet very, very French is more than enough to make him the toast of Paris.

Getting into the minds of "primitive" or "Third World" people seems to have an endless appeal to a certain Western taste. As if all that magic and superstition and suffering at the hands of incomprehensible historical forces makes the reader feel better about living in Milan or Chicago. Occasionally, when this style is attempted by a superbly talented novelist, you get something brilliant and enjoyable. One thinks of Mario Vargas Llosa's The Storyteller, or William Golding's The Inheritors. Updike pulls it off in Brazil and The Coup. But unfortunately it is more often a patronizing, touristic exercise than an enlightening one -- a bit like the Hollywood movies which try to sell the notion that retarded or insane people have a lot to teach us about what life is really all about.

Although Texaco doesn't quite begin at the beginning, it is really a high-falutin family saga that starts in the days when Martinique was covered with sugar plantations and ends with a town council recognizing the property rights of shantytown settlers in the late 1980s. It is narrated by the daughter of a freed slave who was the founder of this Creole shantytown, built on the site of an oil-tank farm and therefore called Texaco. This woman's narrative -- which includes some unlikely modernist reflections on the nature of literature, language, and "human truths" -- is interspersed with notes written by an ethnologist called Oiseau de Cham, and the ruminations of an urban planner. "The Creole urban planner must from now on restart new trails, in order to arouse a countercity in the city." This man, referred to as "the Christ" by the locals, sees the beauty of the shantytown and prevents its demolition by the authorities.

Mr. Chamoiseau does succeed in conjuring an alternative universe of "mentoh" magicians and complex racial hierarchies: mulattoes, city-blackmen, maroons, "chabins" and "capresses," "guava-bekes" and "france-whites." History from below and ethnological research are all very well, but to do a Garcia Marquez, you need strong characters and a story that never gets lost in the lushness. (Despite all the description, I finished this novel without any sense of what Martinique actually looks like.) Chamoiseau is fatally infected by whatever it is that makes French novelists even more self-indulgent than our own literary stars.

It is worth noting that, unlike say, Jamaica Kincaid, whose work is full of bitterness against the colonial oppressors who taught her to speak and write their language so well, Chamoiseau's Creole characters really love France and its ideals. It makes for an interesting paradox about ex-colonies and literary achievement. For, unlike the former British possessions in the Caribbean, Martinique is not independent. It is still a part of France. Those former British colonies have brought forth some of the best writers in English of this century. V. S. Naipaul, from Trinidad, and the brilliant poet Derek Walcott, from Barbados, are only the most celebrated of some spectacular talents. Yet this much-hyped, Goncourt Prize - winning book never even approaches the quality of the least of their works.

Jorge Luis Borges, an Argentine, is supposed to have said that his country's greatest tragedy was to have been colonized by the Spanish rather than the English. However, at least as far as literature goes, the Latin Americans were fortunate not to have been colonized by the French.