May 6, 2001

A Pack of Lies

A Frenchman deceived his family for 18 years, then killed them.

By JULIE SALAMON

THE ADVERSARY

A True Story of Monstrous Deception.

By Emmanuel Carrère. Translated by Linda Coverdale.

191 pp. New York:

Metropolitan Books/

Henry Holt & Company. $22.



or a high school examination, Jean-Claude Romand chose as his topic in philosophy ''Does truth exist?'' This wasn't an unusual selection for a smart teenage boy preparing for university and adulthood and wondering what it all meant. Only later would Romand's youthful interest in that particular question feel creepily portentous.

Subsequently, throughout most of his adult life, Romand defied the constraints of truth, acting as both author and main character in the personal fiction that he substituted for reality. He fabricated crucial elements of his daily being, including his profession; he successfully -- and falsely -- convinced his wife, his closest friends and his parents that he was a physician at the World Health Organization. He proved that the mundane lie may be even more successful than the big lie, because who would lie about easily verifiable matters?

Romand would find, though, as many novelists do, that constructing a durable plot isn't easy. He had generated too many scenarios without conceivable resolutions. He was straining plausibility -- and he wasn't writing a novel, he was living a life. So he decided to destroy everything. On Jan. 9, 1993, he killed his wife and his two children, and then he killed his mother and his father. When it was all done, he set fire to his home.

These events, which took place in a comfortable French town near the Swiss border, became notorious in France and attracted Emmanuel Carrère, a novelist and screenwriter. Carrère sent Romand a letter in which he explained why he wanted to write a book about the case: ''I am not approaching you out of some unhealthy curiosity or a taste for the sensational. What you have done is not in my eyes the deed of a common criminal, or that of a madman, either, but the action of someone pushed to the limit by overwhelming forces, and it is these terrible forces I would like to show at work.''

By the time Romand responded, two years later, Carrère had become repulsed by his fascination with the killings. ''Now the case and especially my interest in it rather disgusted me,'' he writes. But he couldn't resist Romand's willingness to talk to him, and he was drawn back in. He applied for permission to visit Romand in jail, and then acquired press credentials for his trial.

Carrère would become a reporter, pursuing the psychological and factual details he would need for a book. At the same time he was looking inward, trying to decipher his own motives. Why was he so preoccupied with this case, which made him feel ''ashamed in front of my children, that their father should be writing about that''? What emerged from this obsessional stew of reportorial zeal and writerly introspection is ''The Adversary'' (another name, in both English and French, for the Devil), a fascinating meditation on Jean-Claude Romand and what his bizarre life might mean.

Carrère's inquiry is highly personal, written in lucid prose that has been elegantly translated by Linda Coverdale. ''On the Saturday morning of Jan. 9, 1993, while Jean-Claude Romand was killing his wife and children, I was with mine in a parent-teacher meeting.'' With this seductive beginning, Carrère establishes one of the connections he feels with the killer. They are -- or were -- both fathers of young children. Certainly the writer's examination is enriched by an appreciation of family life and its satisfactions. The book has many homely details, like Romand taking his children to buy Legos not long before he kills them. He writes of the affectionate look of ''goofy wonderment'' he sees on Romand's face in a photograph with his children.

It is a dangerous and possibly futile exercise to extrapolate broad meaning from singular events, and Carrère understands that. ''It's impossible to think about this story without feeling that there is a mystery here with a hidden explanation,'' he says. ''But the mystery is that there is no explanation and that, as unlikely as it may seem, that's how it happened.'' When Carrère goes ahead and tries to find a resolution, ''The Adversary'' loses momentum. Unable to sustain the philosophical burdens the author has imposed on it, this slender book doesn't end so much as fade away.

Still, the narrative is often mesmerizing, and revealing about the fragility of human relationships. We can know so little about someone we think we know very well. Romand never completed his medical schooling, yet managed to fool even his classmates into thinking he did. His lies were large and small, elaborate and simple. People believed him not because he was clever but because he wasn't. His blandness was his cover.

Perhaps most chilling is Carrère's description of Romand's daily routine. He would dutifully head across the border for Geneva every workday, to the headquarters of W.H.O. Some days he would put on a visitor's badge and pass the time in the library. Sometimes he would take hikes in the Jura Mountains. When his ''work'' took him out of town, he'd settle into a hotel near the airport. It was a virtual life, but how much did it differ from a real one? There it is again. What is truth?

Eventually the reader wonders: If he didn't work for the World Health Organization, how did he support his family? More lies, it turns out, involving money scams, which may have involved additional killings. Carrère observes that the money crimes deflated Romand's image. It's one thing to have committed ''crimes so outrageous that they confer tragic stature,'' another to be a petty crook.

In Carrère's investigation the corollary to ''What is truth?'' is ''Who am I?'' -- a continuing question for the author, who once began a novel about a woman who lives a double life. Don't we all, to greater and lesser degrees, do that? Yet Romand is particularly unknowable. Nothing in his childhood even hinted at the path he would take. The explanation he offered at his trial is unsatisfactory but oddly understandable: ''When you get caught in that endless effort not to disappoint people, the first lie leads to another, and then it's your whole life.''