BOOK REVIEW : ‘Fields of Glory’ Goes Back to Childhood in Reverence for the Old : FIELDS OF GLORY:<i> by Jean Rouaud translated by Ralph Manheim</i> ; Arcade $18.45, 152 pages

Frail as they may be, the very old furnish our life with a special form of solidity. They anchor the past; and that may be obvious, but what does it mean?

It suggests that time, which we live in and which slips under, moment by moment, can resurface 50 years along. Those cultures that pause to revere the old may strike us as amiably quaint; the true quaintness is that our culture, by and large, fails to.

In “Fields of Glory,” a Frenchman goes back to childhood to recall the lives of his grandparents, members of a generation decimated in the first World War. It is a modest effort and lavish at the same time. France has greeted it with special enthusiasm, bestowing on it the Goncourt Prize.

In part, this may be due to an unusual circumstance. Jean Rouaud, the author, worked as a newspaper vendor and had never published before. The French literary world, whose prophets tend to be aging even in their 40s, loves to find an occasional baby in the bulrushes.

In part, it has something to do with the times. France oscillates hectically between futurism and traditionalism--the present, it seems, is never quite here--and the current rush into a United Europe has left holes. Rouaud’s book, with its peaceable and occasionally sugared charm, seems to fill such a hole.

The narrator places himself, about 30 years ago, among the children of a struggling middle-class family in a small town in Brittany. Joseph, the father, died not long before at the age of 40. Their mother is dazed with grief; the house, which Joseph maintained so meticulously, shows early signs of disrepair; relatives help out.

This loss is not the subject of the book, but it provides the framework of mortality and resilience--the children find life wherever they can--for the story of the previous generation on the mother’s and father’s sides. The mother’s family, personified by her father, is bouncy and agile, despite reverses. Joseph’s side, with an equal or perhaps deeper talent for life, has been more heavily marked by tragedy.

Grandfather--the mother’s father--provides much of the humor in this novel-memoir. Owner of a once-prosperous clothing business, he has seen his fortunes shrink but not his air of being fortunate. Rouaud makes a Magoo-like figure of him; particularly when driving his tiny car, battered and leaky, through the perpetual Breton rain.

To ride with him is “a rodeo,” since he is a chain smoker and every few minutes turns his full attention to extracting and lighting another cigarette while the car is allowed to amble, horse-like.

Once, on a visit to his daughter in the Midi, he disappears. The fire department is searching the hills when he turns up claiming that he had visited the botanical garden in nearby Hyeres. In fact, he had taken a day-trip to the celebrated nudist island of Levant.

An even more eccentric figure represents the father’s side of the family. She is his Aunt Marie, a perpetually active retired school teacher whose main diligence is to preserve the family by application to dozens of carefully selected saints, one for each possible disaster. There is St. Mamertus for indigestion, St. Lucia for hornets, St. Gourin for wild boars. (The saint tamed them by admonishing: “Beware, piglet. In attacking Gourin you’ve made a big mistake.”)

It is through Marie’s oddities that the book’s gravity enters. The root of comedy is tragedy; this aged virgin stopped menstruating at 26, when her beloved brother, Joseph, died in a hospital from the effects of a German gas attack despite her bedside vigil and the saint’s medals she brought along.

Rouaud makes a terrible evocation of the green cloud that floated early one morning toward the French trenches, of the terrified soldiers shooting at it, of their desperate efforts to flee. He writes of the death in an artillery attack, the following year, of Joseph’s and Marie’s brother, Emile.

“Fields of Glory”--recalling the patriotic propaganda that adorned the senseless killing--has its passages of easy picaresqueness and occasional sentimentality. But it can rise to heights where the life that was lived in those years of killing is dryly and delicately limned. The finest passage in the book is an account of a car trip taken eastward across France, in a bitter winter 12 years after Joseph’s and Emile’s deaths.

The driver is their father, Pierre. He goes to dig up Emile’s remains with the help of one of the young man’s comrades. They boil snow to melt the frozen ground; they find the bones of two indistinguishable corpses; Pierre drives them back across France packed in pastry crates, the unlicensed transport of coffins being forbidden.

The account is compelling; but giving it a brilliant humanity is Pierre’s journal record of missing his lumbering and melancholy wife, Aline, more and more unbearably the farther east he travels.

Next: Elaine Kendall reviews “Olympia” by Otto Friedrich (HarperCollins).