BOOK REVIEW : A French Version of an American Classic : LISA, LISA <i> by Beatrice Shalit</i> , Available Press, $8; 240 pages

A runaway bestseller in France, “Lisa, Lisa” is exactly the sort of relationship novel that has dominated home-grown American fiction for several decades. Like automobiles, plumbing supplies and blue jeans, literature has apparently been affected by the balance of trade, turning us into importers of items we once successfully exported.

Sarah Abner and Luc Pottier are proof that opposites attract but eventually reassert themselves to cause marital difficulties. Once madly in love, they are now estranged; Luc living with a “companion” named Erma, Sarah left with the children and her aged father.

Sarah, who narrates one third of the book, is the daughter of a Holocaust survivor and Resistance hero, the charismatic and charming Leo Abner, now terminally ill. Luc, still technically Sarah’s husband, comes from a French bourgeois family with political attitudes somewhat akin to those of the rabble-rouser Le Pen, although the Pottiers express themselves less stridently. Still, a whiff of wartime collaboration hangs over the Pottier clan, exacerbating the tensions between Sarah and Luc.

Their teen-age son, Jose, always a model of academic excellence and social responsibility, has been feeling neglected since his father left. In a creative but misguided attempt to make his parents reconcile, he has pretended to be a heroin addict. Although Jose’s act wouldn’t fool a 10-year-old, both Sarah and Luc have fallen for it, at least temporarily.

Affected just as profoundly by the separation, Miriam, Jose’s younger sister, chooses a more classic method of attracting their attention, more effective because it’s plausible. This fragmented family--plus Lisa, Sarah’s flaky younger sister--is gathered at an isolated country chateau for a wedding, a traditional device guaranteed to bring matters to a rolling boil.

Sarah, Jose and Luc each have an equal share in the narrative, recounting events from their own perspectives. Unfortunately, a lackluster translation riddled with elderly cliches--”mad as a wet hen,” “takes the cake,” “fresh as a daisy,” “fit as a fiddle”--tend to make everyone sound alike, obliterating the contrasts between characters and generations upon which the plot depends.

Even so, Jose’s precocious intelligence occasionally manages to surface. Sarah, a novelist and comedy writer who might be expected to give herself the best lines, doesn’t fare nearly as well, emerging as a capricious and self-involved woman, exactly the sort to drive her husband to ill-considered retaliation. Luc, although properly remorseful, never quite succeeds in overcoming his fundamental pomposity.

The real hero of “Lisa, Lisa” is Sarah’s dying father, Leo Abner, who wasn’t granted a segment of his own. That’s a pity, because his personality is by far the most compelling and his biography genuinely deserving of a first-hand account.

Lisa, Sarah’s sister, is merely a distracting enigma; the title referring not to her alone but to Sarah’s grandmother, and the grandmother’s best friend, both called Lisa and greeted by the double name whenever they in appeared together. The brief allusion to these long-vanished young women seems meant to reinforce the notion of enduring family ties, the contrasts in background that have driven Luc and Sarah apart.

In addition to the principals, there’s a sizable cast of peripheral characters, enough to fill all the rooms of the chateau. These people and their incidental stories might have made a lively wedding party, but the bride is so thoroughly shaken by exposure to the tempestuous Abners that she calls off the ceremony. In the end, the wedding is only an excuse to bring everyone together for an emotional free-for-all.

Although “Lisa, Lisa” has its diverting and poignant moments, it’s precisely the kind of product at which our own literary industry has always excelled, the import no more stylish or elegant than the American original.