Nov. 29 (Bloomberg) -- If you can't beat 'em, join 'em . or however you say it in French.

In Stephen Clarke's ``A Year in the Merde'' (Bantam, 335 pages, 9.99 pounds), protagonist Paul West sets out doing what Britons do when they first hit France: He sneers at the natives.

By the end of the book, he has turned into one.

First released in 200 self-published copies, the book, which panders to readers' latent Francophobia with its cheeky title and a cover showing snails mating atop a leaning Eiffel Tower, is on the U.K. bestseller lists and has sold about 60,000 copies there, according to public-relations firm Susanna Lea Associates.

``There are lots of French people who are not at all hypocritical, inefficient, treacherous, intolerant, adulterous or incredibly sexy,'' bleats the cover. ``They just didn't make it into my book.''

As the publisher's Web site would have it, the idea first dawned on Clarke when, eyeing the ``enviable sales'' of Peter Mayle's blockbuster ``A Year in Provence,'' he started a diary. Jotting down one first impression after another, the 40-something British expatriate, a journalist and writer according to the book's introduction, soon ended up with the makings of a story.

And an amusing book it is -- initially.

West, the onetime marketing boss of a chain of U.K. cafes called ``Voulez-vous Cafe avec Moi,'' arrives in France with an arsenal of stereotypes on quirky food, snappy locals, and polluting pets, all of which are duly confirmed.

`Disposable Galoshes'

Within weeks, he samples a malodorous sandwich (``Apparently I'd just bitten into a pig's rectum''), slurps an oyster (``lemony, salty bronchial mucus''), meets a shop attendant (``Parlez francais, huh!''), and slides on enough pavement garnish to wrap his shoes in ``disposable galoshes'' made of string-tie garbage bags.

The job, too, brings its share of cliches. He works for a food company run by slippery Jean-Marie and known by its unfortunate acronym, VD. His mission is to open a tearoom called ``My Tea is Rich'' -- a pun on ``My tailor is rich,'' an expression plucked from old-fashioned language methods.

Jean-Marie and his staff of oddballs, all equipped with their own cliches of Britain, are sure the tearoom name is a typical example of ``Ingleesh oomoor.'' West fails to persuade them otherwise, though he does get the company logo, ``VD Exporters,'' altered.

West resents his colleagues' views of Britain, though they reciprocate his own take on France. ``Apart from mad-cow disease and hooligans, the most common things that the French associated with the word `anglais' were the Queen, Shakespeare, David Beckham, Mr. Bean, the Rolling Stones ... and, yes, tea, which was seen as a stylish, civilized drink,'' he whines.

Elodie and Alexa

So he settles for the joys of Paris and of mingling with the opposite sex. One minglee is the boss's daughter Elodie, an overachieving minx who lives in the upmarket Paris equivalent of a housing project, grows marijuana in an overheated cupboard and beds a different man every night.

Then there is Alexa, ``who hid what promised to be a great body under baggy clothes.'' When not consoling her lovelorn gay dad, the photography student with precooked ideas about ``Anglo- Saxons'' joins West on boat rides and country weekends; they split up over the Iraq war.

As the plot takes a series of clumsy turns, West is tossed out of Elodie's low-rent flat, watches his job recede to in-house English teacher, and realizes that his adulterous boss is a crook who runs a shady political campaign in a Norman hamlet.

By this time, West himself has gone native: A trip home reveals his sudden intolerance for salad cream and supermarket bread. So he decides to join his boss and start a scam of his own. ``We're friendly enemies,'' he tells Jean-Marie. ``It's the way things have been between the Brits and the French since Napoleon, isn't it?''

Married Hamsters

Indeed, and that animosity provides plenty of fodder for the likes of Clarke, whose caricatures of France can be apt, such as when he describes the red tape (a residence permit requires passport, photos ``and the marriage certificates of any hamsters I'd owned since 1995, all photocopied on to medieval parchment'') or the overmedication (a doctor prescribes ``a shopping list of antibiotics, painkillers, sprays, menthol rubs and inhalants that would have cured a herd of asthmatic giraffes.'')

Gradually, though, the humor goes awry. Work stoppages, saucy women and accented English stop being funny. Clarke lacks the talent of a Toby Young, author of ``How to Lose Friends and Alienate People,'' whose account of living in New York was consistently side-splitting.

Nor is the scatological thread to all this -- the five-letter French word in the title -- all that clear. Once the narrator learns how to avoid slipping in dog pooh, ``merde'' becomes a loose and lazy metaphor used to describe everything from bucolic sludge to corporate graft.

The book may be a fun read to the many who like laughing at the French. In shelf-life terms, though, ``A Year in the Merde'' is certain to underperform its Provencal predecessor. 336 pages stedda 335 --Editors: Ruane, Hoelterhoff, Schatz.

To contact the reporter on this story: Farah Nayeri in London at farahn@bloomberg.net.

Last Updated: November 28, 2004 20:05 EST