[Broyard was an influential American literary critic who, during his career, contributed book reviews to the New York Times, served as editor of the New York Times Book Review, and lectured on sociology and literature at the New School for Social Research. In the following review, he finds Kundera's stories overrated and merely "passable. " ]

It seems to me that dissident writers from Iron Curtain countries are generally overestimated in the United States. We praise them for their moral courage, and overlook their literary lapses. Their fiction takes on for us a tension of personal risk and political drama that obscures its mediocrity as art. We feel the anguish of the writer's position and transpose it to his work. In a simple inversion, the censor's disapproval is regarded as a guarantee of quality. There is a naive assumption that a man would not risk his career or his life to write a bad book.

If the style of the writer is pedestrian, we attribute this to the translator or to the author's using the idiomatic richness and resonant ambiguity of his native tongue so cunningly as to defy translation. Bemused by the exotic or the unfamiliar, we are like vacationers determined to enjoy a trip to a foreign country even if its only novelties are negative ones. We tell ourselves that the experience is therapeutic.

OVERFOND OF PHILOSOPHY

Passable is the word I would use to describe most of the stories in Laughable Loves, by the Czech author Milan Kundera. He explains too much and, for a writer of fiction, he is overfond of philosophy. One of the virtues of fiction is its evocation of the essential mystery of life, and philosophizing can only muddle this. It also pushes the writer's style toward the pontifical, resulting in sentences like this one: "Our story does not intend to be crowned with effect of so ostentatious a paradox."

"The Hitchhiking Game" is an interesting gift in a poorly wrapped parcel. During their vacation, a young man and his girl friend playfully assume the roles of a driver and a casual pickup. The girl has always been inhibited and her lover has tended to idealize her innocence at the expense of her sensuality. When they find themselves "liberated" by their game, it is exciting. They are reluctant to relinquish it, and gradually the game becomes an obsession. They feel that they are experiencing each other in a purely physical sense for the first time and their lovemaking is intense—so intense that it strikes the girl as a threat to her identity. "I am me, I am me, I am me . . ." she sobs afterwards, and her lover, infuriated by her betrayal of herself, retrospectively shocked with the typical priggishness of the possessive, blames her for his disillusionment.

"Let the Old Dead Make Room for the Young Dead," was Mr. Kundera's best story, but for all its good moments, it has a clumsiness as art that reminds one of the clothing men wear in his country: the square cut, padded jackets with overlong sleeves, the shapeless trousers that deny the human form inside them. The story deals with a 35-year-old man who fears that the "balance sheet" of his life shows a deficit. He has experienced almost nothing, especially in the case of women, who suddenly become for him "the one legitimate criterion of life's density."

When he re-encounters a woman with whom he spent one night some 15 years ago, he mourns the fact that, at the time, "she defied his imagination" and he could not assimilate her. Now she has returned to Prague, where he lives, to visit the grave of her husband, for she cherishes the "memorials" of her life as much as he regrets the fleeting emptiness of his. Though she is 50 now, he is determined to reach again for the essence that eluded him, while she weighs the security of her memorials against the throb of the present. For both of them, the reunion turns out to be an embracing not only of each other but also of life itself.

"Nobody Will Laugh" is supposed to be a satirical portrait of Czechoslovkia's intellectual bureaucracy, but it is such a tangle of silly improbabilities and its central character is so stunningly uninteresting that the party hacks and bureaucrats become heroes by default.

"The Golden Apple of Eternal Desire" is about compulsive girl-chasing, a theme that ought to have reached retirement age even in Czechoslovakia, where the difference in cultures has not succeeded in giving it a fresh turn. Mr. Kundera tried to romanticize his jaded characters with a platonic notion of "absolute pursuit" that transcends even consummation, but nothing can redeem the puerility of two men who collect girls' addresses as small boys collect baseball cards.

SEXUAL BEHAVIOR IS FOCUS

"Symposium" and "Doctor Havel After Ten Years" are both set pieces, mere vehicles for some unremarkable aphorisms about sexual behavior. Occasionally, "Symposium" rises to a certain stodgy sublimity, but both stories are little more than pseudo-sophisticated psychologizing, thinly disguised as fiction. In sexual decadence, the Czechs cannot compete with the government-encouraged strides of democratic societies.

"Edward and God" is one of those stories that sound better in summation. Edward is a young teacher whose job is jeopardized by the fact that he has been seen in church and that this is "improper" behavior in the eyes of his officially atheistic superiors. Edward goes to church, however, only in order to seduce the devout Alice. In a switch reminiscent of Mack Sennett or the Marx Brothers, he ends by rejecting Alice and becoming the lover of the haglike directress of his school.

This might be amusing if Edward were not so humorless himself. In fact, this is one of the failures of most of Mr. Kundera's characters: they don't react to themselves reacting, in that luxury of consciousness that modern fiction usually enjoys. They seem to be cramped somewhere between fatalism and literal-mindednss, as if they had forgotten, under pressure, the immense range of human possibility.