NONFICTION - April 28, 1996

AT HOME IN FRANCE: Tales of an American and Her House Abroad by Ann Barry (Ballantine Books: $20; 247 pp.). Consider this genre of books fodder for your reveries. Some day, you too might take a couple of hard-earned dollars over to a tiny village in Europe and plunk it down on a stone farmhouse in need of repair. Then life and work would be endurable. The best of these books, I think, are those in which the author does not intrude too much in the reverie, leaving room for the readers to put themselves in the plot. Barry, who here offers us just such a book, grew up in the Midwest, worked in New York as an editor at the New York Times and the New Yorker and discovered her love of France in 1971, renting a farmhouse in the Perigord. This visit inspired the purchase of a stone house in the village of Carennac, where she spends several weeks just twice a year. Her stories of finding the best baker in the region, buying a car and getting bitten by a dog are vastly different from, say, those of Peter Mayle, who more forcefully insinuates himself into the landscape.