Fly on the Wall.(The Talk of the Town)

Yasmina Reza, the French playwright ("Art," among other works), was in town last week, talking about her newly translated book on Nicolas Sarkozy, the French President, entitled "Dawn Dusk or Night." Sarkozy allowed Reza, a newcomer to political journalism, to trail his steps and record his words--hour by hour, throughout his campaign for the Presidency, until he was elected a year ago--in one of those follow-me-around, open-access deals that politicians make in haste and always seem to have occasion to regret at leisure. Her account, when it appeared in France, last summer, caused a more than mild kerfuffle, not because it contained any particular revelation about the much gossiped-about and self-revealing President but because of the strange mixture of stasis and mostly mindless, or, anyway, undirected, energy that she portrayed as the leitmotif of Sarkozyism--a portrait not exactly hostile, and made more credible by events since, of a meteoric arc with no particular place to end but a crater. Deliberately anti-dramatic, the book is a series of vignettes, fragments, tiny scraps of dialogue, and small, "meaningless" moments--"Franck? Is there any candy?" Sarkozy asks an aide. "He is handed a box of Rimbambelle that he cannot manage to open. Silent and violent struggle against the plastic packaging. . . . He eats a piece of the candy and offers me the box without a word"--all designed to create a portrait of what Reza calls "the extraordinary prison of political destiny." The entire effect is something of a cross between Joan Didion's political journalism and a series of cryptic outtakes from "Last Year at Marienbad":

On the plane back. Still somber., I dare: , Does it still seem a long way off for you?, I don't think about it., So you live day by day?, Yes. I just think of what I have to get done that day. That's enough., Silence. He looks at his hands. Then, he adds: , Why even think?, It's a valid question. It could be applied to a lot of things., Yes. To a lot of things.

Seductive and voluble, somewhat on the Sonia Rykiel model, Reza, who is forty-nine, emphasizes that what she has written shouldn't make her seem to have any desire to become a social or political pundit, or even to be taken as an "observer" of the French scene: "I ...