BOOK REVIEW : Psychoanalyst’s First Attempt at a Novel Inspires a Yawn of Boredom : THE SAMURAI; <i> By Julia Kristeva</i> ; <i> Translated from French by Barbara Bray</i> ; Columbia University Press $24.95; 352 pages

Julia Kristeva is a French psychoanalyst and critic, author of many books. “The Samurai,” translated by Barbara Bray, is her first attempt at a novel.

It reads more like a treatise, an encapsulation of Structuralist theories, than a novel. Her meager plot involves the private lives and romantic travails of a group of French intellectuals who are the upper echelon of the leftist revolutionary movement of the late 1960s.

Kristeva’s characters include thinly veiled fictional renditions of such luminaries as Claude Levi-Strauss and Roland Barthes, who will be recognizable to aficionados of the ‘60s Structuralist movement. Kristeva’s insights into the private lives of such renowned writers, along with her long and complicated polemics on their critical theories, might seem enticing to insiders. But to the average educated American reader, “The Samurai” will seem fairly inaccessible and hard going.

The narrative describes the arrival in France of Olga Moreno, a young Eastern Bloc communist critic who plans to study and write in Paris, and her subsequent involvement with this left-wing group of French professors, writers and critics. Olga falls in love with Herve Sinteuil, a renowned writer and magazine editor, the nucleus of the group, just as Paris goes into a state of national unrest.

Although the group is active in the May, 1968, uprising that almost succeeded in bringing down the Gaullist government, the author fails to convey the excitement of this revolutionary time. Throughout, the reader is left in the dark about relevant facts. For example, Kristeva doesn’t name Olga’s Eastern Bloc country--is it the Soviet Union? Or Czechoslovakia, which is in the throes of its own revolutionary movement, the Prague Spring? Olga’s critical essays have been denounced by her government, and back home she has feared arrest. Yet she does not seem to have mixed feelings concerning communism; in fact, she seems to have no feelings at all. The 1968 Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, an event of some importance to an Eastern European, is never mentioned.

The book is divided into five sections, each concluding with passages from the diary of a character named Joelle Cabarus. She watches the other main characters from a distance, offering an objective, if unrelated, view of the situation, which seems to be the one thread that binds the disparate sections together.

Kristeva’s defense of her novel’s structure reads like a preemptive strike against criticism: “The advantage of a life (or a story) in the shape of a star--in which things may move without necessarily intersecting and advance without necessarily meeting, and where every day (or chapter) is a different world pretending to forget the one before--is that it corresponds to what seems to be an essential tendency of the world itself: its tendency to expand, to dilate. . . . The same movement is reflected in a story that keeps making new starts, leaving the reader half disappointed, half eager: He may never find what he’s looking for, but as long as progress is being made . . . too bad about the people who prefer the wheel to come full circle.”

And too bad, presumably, for readers who are looking simply to be entertained or are interested in character dynamics and motivation, for they will need toothpicks to prop open their eyes. “The Samurai” may amuse the already converted disciples of Structuralism, but for the lovers of realism, of novels like Balzac’s, Stendahl’s or Flaubert’s, “The Samurai” will probably seem like a case of the proverbial emperor’s new clothes.