Readers will have to look hard for a book which is as insubstantial and as unsatisfying as Françoise Sagan's most recent novel, "The Heart-Keeper". In slightly more than one hundred pages of half-hearted prose, the story takes its readers through four murders and through the innumerable cynical bleatings of its amoral and middle-aged protagonist. This would be Dorothy Seymour—a Hollywood screen writer whose world-weary outlook is typified by an early statement, coming in the third paragraph of the novel: "Meanwhile, the sovereign of my heart, of my body at least, was to be Paul Brett that evening, and I yawned in advance."

Correction: we all yawn in advance and our expectations are fully confirmed. (p. 335)

"The Heart-Keeper" has the distinction of being the first Sagan novel with a completely American setting. It may be that Miss Sagan was unable to adapt her writing to a new...