'Camus, A Romance' by Elizabeth Hawes

Hawes' idiosyncratic narrative runs more or less chronologically through Camus' life but assumes readers' familiarity with such mundane facts as the year of his birth (1913) and with the content of his books. Her approach slightly scants Camus' historical importance, first as a voice of the French Resistance and eloquent articulator of a humane philosophy to counter nihilism and hopelessness, then as a painfully conflicted spokesman for the non-aligned left during the most polarized years of the Cold War. What Hawes does brilliantly is bring to life Camus the human being: the charming friend, the seductive womanizer, the lifelong outsider "from somewhere else."

That "somewhere else" was working-class French Algeria. He was the son of a deaf, illiterate cleaning woman whose husband was killed in World War I; Camus dedicated his final novel to his mother, "who will never be able to read this book." It's characteristic of Hawes' delicately perceptive text that this brief quotation opens a vast inner panorama: The man regarded as a quintessential French intellectual was born among people to whom the world of ideas was literally a closed book, and Camus never forgot them. He was always most at ease, Hawes writes later, with his working-class copains (pals); among them he dropped his famous pudeur, that untranslatable word for the modesty and reserve that made even Maria Casares, the actress who was his lover for two decades, say that she never really knew him. The sun and sea of coastal Algeria gave Camus an unabashed joy in life's physical pleasures that distinguishes even his darkest works; the tuberculosis he contracted at age 17 in Algiers' cramped, unhealthy Belcourt quarter instilled the sense of life's mortal absurdity that afflicted so many as the world lurched toward bloody confrontation with fascism.

Camus' protracted battle with TB, his devotion to his mother (a perennial reminder of the horizon-extinguishing poverty that he escaped but millions could not) and the central importance of Algeria are the first of many crucial yet neglected aspects of his experience that Hawes spotlights. Others come later: his dedication to the theater, which satisfied his zest for communal activity; the conflict between his need for constant companionship and his desire for the solitude necessary to create; his guilt over failing to live up to his moral code, especially in his serial infidelities to his wife. Throughout the book, Hawes sensitively reads Camus' writings and judiciously dips into his biography to vividly evoke his character and milieu.

These lucid, sympathetic insights would have even more force if the author had confined her personal confidences to the prologue. There, they are moving, but it seems self-indulgent when Hawes breaks into Camus' story to inform us that she feels "unexpected sadness" as he prepares to leave Algeria for France in 1942, or that his pudeur "is a quality I share." Yet, as is so often the case with a gifted writer (Hawes is also the author of a marvelous social history, "New York, New York"), this flaw is inextricably linked to her book's greatest strength: the passion of her engagement with her subject. We get a bit too much of Hawes in her frankly confessional narrative, but perhaps that's what she needed to do to give us so much of Camus with such perceptiveness and warmth.

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Smith is the author of "Real Life Drama: The Group Theatre and America, 1931-1940."