BOOK REVIEW / FICTION : Death of a Cheerier, French Willy Loman : OF ILLUSTRIOUS MEN <i> by Jean Rouaud</i> ; Translated from the French by Barbara Wright; Arcade $19.95, 160 pages

“Attention must be paid,” Willy Loman’s wife demands on behalf of her failing salesman husband. It is a cry of outrage that an ordinary man could work so hard to wrestle support and hope for his family, and get such a shabby return.

Jean Rouaud’s partly fictional portrait of his traveling-salesman father carries a message that is ostensibly similar. Attention must be paid to Joseph Rouaud, who drove hundreds of miles each day along the back roads of Brittany, lugging cases packed with china and glassware from village shop to village shop; whose laborious life could not contain an insurgent spirit; and who was felled by a coronary at the age of 41.

But there is a distance between “Of Illustrious Men” and “Death of a Salesman.” One might call it a distance between Europe and America. Rouaud’s book is an evocation more than a protest.

The rigors of history and of society have bruised Joseph Rouaud’s heart. He spent years in the Resistance, and modern commerce is beginning to stifle the village shop. But his heart has done some of its own bruising: the weakness of the organ his parents bequeathed him, the charge of passion he kept it tuned up to, the law of life that says you struggle and die.

Society and the state are not only an abstract Other; they are personages too--as the king once was--and they have rights and claims, even if you do your best to get around them.

If they--along with time, other people, and inward raging--play a part in wearing a man out, this has more to do with tragedy than injustice. It does not demean in the same way that injustice does; it does not crush in the same way that Willy Loman was crushed.

“Of Illustrious Men” is more golden than grieving; it is told with more gaiety than grimness, though darker notes are always present. Like Rouaud’s “Fields of Glory,” it tells its story of a modest provincial family in a series of exquisitely written scenes.

It begins with Joseph on his roof untangling the telephone wire from some overhanging branches. Right afterward, this supremely buoyant and energetic man will feel a sudden exhaustion.

With its fatal outcome, the scene will develop in more detail toward the end; here it is the telephone line that counts. It connects us--as will succeeding scenes, each with a moment of premonitory pain--to an aspect of Joseph’s life in the west of France in the early 1950s.

The telephone line, for example, illustrates the authority that Joseph holds in the village. His ingenuity and habit of assurance make others wait to see what he will do, whether it is a matter of assembling to consider the features of his new Peugeot, or rallying around when he organizes a communal cleaning after a smoky lantern fills his kitchen with oily soot.

(This is one of many scenes whose comedy harbors something richer and more telling: in this case the staggering number of pots, implements and chinaware amassed over many provident rural generations.)

Back to the telephone--in the book, too, we constantly advance by detours. Joseph possesses one of the few in the village. His neighbors use it to escape the postmistress’s eavesdropping at the telephone office; Joseph and his family considerately cover their ears when a neighbor makes a call, and Rouaud writes:

“The result was that we felt handicapped by the trust with which we were honored and didn’t like to ask people to pay for their calls. But we valued the privilege.”

Rouaud evokes the long hours of driving on gravel roads, stuck behind droves of cattle and the drover, who rides on a bicycle and flourishes a red flag. He writes of the endless ceremonial of the stops, hauling out six heavy cases and selling no more than two or three plates or glasses.

He writes of the large map of Brittany on which Joseph plans each day’s route, with pins marking the shops, other pins marking attractive restaurants; the whole linked up by threads of different colors. Over the years he drove the equivalent of 2 1/2 times the Earth’s circumference; his trips “wound like a ball of wool around a tiny little territory.”

Rouaud writes of Sunday excursions with the family--using the same wool-crossed map--to visit interesting spots and gather enormous rocks, one of Joseph’s possibly fatal passions.

He gives glimpses of Joseph’s days in the Resistance; at one point guiding one of Patton’s tank columns on a detour to see his fiancee. He records with graceful, stoic lightness the details of his father’s collapse and death.

We do not die from being sick but from being alive, Montaigne wrote. In Rouaud’s scattered and compelling snapshots, Joseph’s large appetite for life is an aura of glory; while in each snapshot the appetite’s shadow advances.