The kindest interpretation one can put on "Maybe," Lillian Hellman's new book, is that it is a parody of contemporary fiction. Non sequiturs, gratuitous acts, frustrating ellipses, ambiguities, a dearth of emotion: Miss Hellman avails herself of all these current techniques in telling a story that she keeps telling us may not be a story at all.

On every page, sentences begin with I've forgotten, I don't remember, I don't know, I am no longer sure. This encourages us to suppose that "Maybe" may be about the antics of memory, the elusiveness of truth or character…. No one, she suggests, can possess the whole truth with any confidence.

"Maybe" is described on the dust jacket as "a story," yet Miss Hellman presents herself, her husband and Dashiell Hammett, with whom she lived for years, as characters in the book, and the events seem to be offered as autobiography.

The heroine of this story or memoir is a beautiful woman named Sarah Cameron, whom Miss Hellman saw only intermittently over 40 years. A pathological liar, a poseuse, a virtuosa of discontinuities, Sarah resembles Lady Brett in Hemingway's "The Sun Also Rises." She is a familiar femme fatale from a period in women's evolution that may now strike us as quaint, a time when boredom was indistinguishable from sophistication.

After saying that she likes Sarah, Miss Hellman adds that "she is of no importance to my life and never was." The provisional nature of her portrait shows, Miss Hellman remarks, "how inattentive I was." Our fiction seems to have become so independent of reality that authors now boast of their inattentiveness. (pp. 317-18)

It is anybody's guess why Miss Hellman wrote "Maybe." It isn't fiction, and as a memoir it reads like a disjointed hangover that lasted 40 years. There will undoubtedly be readers who will see its disclaimers about memory as an apologia pro vita sua, but then that could be said of anything that anybody writes. (p. 318)