Pillion Riders

Although the setup of Taylor's fifth novel (after Mother Country ) seems hopelessly Lawrencian--wealthy woman abandons loveless marriage for poor intellectual who is skilled in the sack--the plot unfolds with a few refreshing twists. Opal Gressinger is the boyishly thin ``decorative'' wife of one of her father's wealthy business associates. During a visit to post-WW II Paris with her husband, Opal meets destitute composer Jean-Claude Guerigny and requests to be shown Paris at night from the pillion of his motorcycle. ``We were one another's life-raft,'' she recalls thinking before spending the night with him. But when she abandons her husband and moves in with the young Frenchman, who resides in an untidy dark attic on the outskirts of Paris, she discovers, among other things, that his mind is morbidly bound up in the suicide of his sister, Montaine. It's not surprising that Taylor, author of a critical bibliography called Marcel Proust and His Contexts , frames the novel as she does: Opal, grown old, sits with a rug around her shoulders and tells another man the painful story of her years with Jean-Claude. The dreamy, mulled tone of Taylor's writing complements the author's apparent fascination with memory, desire and le temps perdu. (Sept.)