BIG BLONDES.<i> By Jean Echenoz</i> .<i> Translated by Mark Polizzotti</i> .<i> The New Press: 201 pp., $22</i>

I wanted to read “Big Blondes” because of the title. I was not disappointed. Anticipation, contrary to previous experience, did not destroy the book. Even the ending is apt, clever and satisfying. And I had been caught by the first line, “You are Paul Salvador and you’re looking for someone.”

But to be honest, maybe I was a setup for Echenoz’s novel. My first love was, of course, blond. (That year, that summer, etc.) The mother of my children was blond when she was younger. My children were blond. My first movie star heroine was the blond Carol Lynley, and she is still, to my “rational” mind, the greatest Hollywood actress of the 20th century. Blonds are supposed to turn the head and addle the brain.

Let’s get some stuff out of the way. “Big Blondes” is translated from the French but no, you are not supposed to think of this like your first experience of high school French. This French novel is different. You don’t have to think of that squat dour gnome Sartre or of boring novels only poorly paid academics can understand. Liam O’Flaherty said once that the only place to learn French is in bed and not alone.

Grandes blondes: big blonds or tall blonds. You can go either way but there are no big blonds in the novel although there is a lot of talk about tall blonds. Dorothy Parker’s “Big Blonde” does not appear. I read an interview that Echenoz himself favors tall blonds (as the title for his novel), but I guess the publisher thinks “Big Blondes” is less intimidating than “Tall Blondes.” Having made such distinctions, we are on our way into the novel, and it should be said that the translation is excellent.

Echenoz has published six novels in France. Three have been translated, but only two have been published in English (“Cherokee” and “Double Jeopardy”). His novels win prizes, and you see them in all the bookstore windows in Paris. Possibly with “Big Blondes,” Echenoz will get a place in the literary motel we Americans reserve for foreign authors. With Margurite Duras and Georges Perec dead, maybe Echenoz canmove into the French Room. His previous novels were clever hommages to American thrillers in the way that European designers gave jeans back to the American consumer. “Big Blondes,” like all good books, refers only to itself.

A plot summary is needed, but it must be careful not to spoil the reading of the actual novel. Salvador, a television producer, has an idea but he also has a formula for a hit program. It is outlandish, but not so outlandish that it wouldn’t grab the attention of a Hollywood producer reading Echenoz’s charming and satiric description of Salvador’s formula:

“A good reliable formula that has proven itself time and time again. You go in search of a name whose posterity has faded, whose echo has died out. Retired talk-show host, single-role actor, overachieving crook, radio game-show champion, vanished top-of-the-bill amnestied by memory. You exhume a one-time instant celebrity who had soon dissolved into neglect, someone people remember so little that they don’t even remember having forgotten him, but who is there nonetheless: stored like the others at the back of a closet, in memory’s oldest boxes. Those boxes are still there, way in back, even though a few have been damaged by a leak in memory’s ceiling. The labels pasted on them are now a bit hard to read. Salvador’s programs consist in repainting the ceiling, refreshing the memory, opening those boxes.”

“But this might take a more intimate and personal turn. So it was, for example, with ‘From the Bottom of My Heart,’ a ratings hit with the pre-retirement crowd in the provinces, or with ‘The Prettiest Girl on the Beach’ (‘You once saw the prettiest girl on the beach and you remember her. You remember her all too well, though you didn’t dare talk to her. Do you remember her name? Write to us, We’ll find you that prettiest girl on your beach.’)”

Back to the plot summary. It is Echenoz’s discursive patter that keeps us reading and this time, the producer has an idea for a series based upon blonds and, having somehow worked out most of the difficulties of the series, he still needs that last necessary ironic celebrity. Salvador sends out the bumbling private investigators to track down Gloria Stella (“sounds kind of like a fishing boat”):

“Born Gloire Abgrall, precocious teenage fashion model. Entered the world of variety shows under the pseudonym dreamed up by Gilbert Flon, her lover-cum-agent. Bottom line: those two 45s, a shot at the Olympia, a few tours as special guest star, number three on the hit parade for ‘Excessive’; photographs, autographs, fan club, movies on the horizon. It all looked very promising until Gilbert Flon took a suspicious dive down a fourth-floor elevator shaft. Since then suspicion, investigation, prosecution witnesses, indictment, trial, verdict (five years; extenuating circumstances), prison, release for good conduct, disappearance.”

It is this art of encapsulation that makes Echenoz’s novel so distinctive. Style alone is sometimes sufficient, but when there are a mind and content behind it, the result is durable goods: “One can envision sleep in various forms. Gray scarf, smoke-screen, sonata. Gliding flight of a great pale bird, open green portal. Plains. But also slipknot, asphyxiating gas, bass clarinet. Insect retracted onto its brief life, final warning before repossession. Rampart. It’s a matter of style; it depends on the way each one sleeps or doesn’t sleep, on the dreams that scare or spare one.”

The blond gets wind of the chase and as the blurb might say: From Paris to Britanny to Australia to Bombay, a comic romp complete with two neat killings, which I suppose one should have some moral scruples about--probably along the lines of whether the victims deserved their ends, but part of our delight is finding ourselves suspending any obligation to show up for such heavy-duty water carrying.

However the various reflections on blonds are some of the chief delights of “Big Blondes,” as when the producer is doodling, “the adjectives brunette and blonde one above the other, then the nouns cigarettes and beer correspondingly superimposed across them, with a complicated network of arrows and brackets linking the two columns.”

Of course there is an element of precise satire on the arbitrary and possibly superficial nature of all such classifications, “Certain incandescent tall blondes rush forward into the world with open arms. They speak vivaciously, laugh freely, think quickly and drink heartily. They look proudly at the world, toss it terrible and generous smiles. Sometimes the world becomes flustered at the sight of them, sometimes it is intimidated by that sure, confident, low-necked way they have of rushing toward it, toward you, arms wide open in the direction of your own. The gaiety, the fearsome gaiety of those solar tall blondes. You might note Kim Novak in the margin.”

Or, “It appears that tall blondes possess an acute awareness of their singularity. This sense of being special, of constituting the product of a mutation, a genetic phenomenon, even a natural catastrophe, can foster a certain tendency toward self-dramatization.”

Echenoz also knows there is a far more common sort of blond in the world, “The artificial blonde is thus a specific category apart. Which the artificial brunette isn’t. In any case the artificial brunette is improbable, we can’t see any reason for her to exist. She doesn’t create an event the way an artificial blonde can, who has chosen her color with this one objective in mind. So coloring your hair only scandalizes in one direction.”

But all such curlicues are in the service of the story as when the blond heroine makes a disconcerting discovery: “She has just noticed a groundswell of light gold threatening the roots of her drab hair.” By such details, Echenoz is letting the reader know that here is a complicated heroine: The blond heroine has colored her hair brown! It is this gentle tending to perversity that links Echenoz to that other master of the perverse detail, Vladimir Nabokov.

And I wanted to end this review with some sort of snappy blurb designed to sell millions of copies of “Big Blondes,” and maybe that is it: Right now go out and join the millions who will enjoy “Big Blondes.” However, let Echenoz’s producer go on a bit: “Look into the effects of the sun’s rays on tall blondes. Let us ponder. No half measures with it: The sun bronzes you or burns you, it colors or kills. If it generously tans the warm triumphant tall blondes, it pitilessly carbonizes the refrigerated chlorotic ones. Too porous and translucent, the chlorotic tall blondes immediately redden, heat up and shrivel away. Only the triumphant ones remain, the ones whose portrait we tried to sketch in Chapter 11. Their denser epidermis, their more resistant complexion, give the ultraviolets a hero’s welcome.”