April 1, 1984

Consumers and the Market Traditionally, strong stock markets create the psychological climate for increased consumer borrowing and spending - two of the nation's most powerful economic engines. But the 12-month market advance between mid-1982 and mid-1983 was so strong that it is believed to have had a negative influence on consumers' current spending behavior. Why? Jack W. Lavery, chief economist at Merrill Lynch & Company, says that while the strong advance may have added roughly $530 billion to the financial net worth of the nation's households before the bull market ended in the middle of 1983, it also caused consumers to shoot their spending and borrowing bolts by last summer. They borrowed so heavily, and spent that borrowed money with such abandon - on new homes, autos, appliances and other big- ticket items - that they may now have temporarily exhausted their resources. At any rate, consumer spending has been growing at about half the pace of last year's second quarter.

THE ties between Exxon and Morgan Stanley, premier names in oil and investment banking, date back at least half a century. For decades, whenever Exxon turned to Wall Street to issue new stocks or bonds, Morgan Stanley was by its side, usually as the lead underwriter for the money-raising effort under way. Even today, the two companies occupy the same gleaming skyscraper in midtown Manhattan. But when Exxon set its financing for 1983 - a modest $77.7 million in tax-exempt bonds - it did not turn to its traditional investment banker. The oil giant opted, instead, for E. F. Hutton and its ''lower floaters,'' a new kind of long-term bond with a floating interest rate. Explained W. Allen Harrison, Exxon's assistant treasurer: ''Morgan Stanley does not have a product here.''

WHEN the state's Pinelands Commission was created under the 1979 Pinelands Protection Act, builders, developers and local officials protested that growth in South Jersey would be stifled. Individually and in organizations, they sought to overturn the law. When those efforts failed, many said they would continue to resist its regulations. In the last three years, the commission has, indeed, rejected or cut back development plans that predated adoption of the Pinelands Comprehensive Management Plan, but it has also mandated growth - at least in parts of three Atlantic County townships - that is higher than the townships sought under their own master plans. (The Comprehensive Management Plan divides the 1.1 million acres of the pinelands into two basic sections: An inner, ecologically fragile Preservation Area, in which development is all but prohibited, and a larger Protection Area, which is further divided into sections designated for such things as agriculture, forests, rural development and regional growth.)

CHILDHOOD By Nathalie Sarraute. Translated by Barbara Wright in consultation with the author. 246 pp. New York: George Braziller. $14.95. AMONG the great women of French letters still among us, including Simone de Beauvoir, Marguerite Duras and Marguerite Yourcenar, Nathalie Sarraute has devoted herself the most single-mindedly to refining and extending the novel as an instrument of exploration. Since the appearance in 1939 of her first book of prose pieces, ''Tropisms,'' Mme. Sarraute has published eight novels, the earliest of them with a glowing preface by Sartre. A short book of literary essays, ''The Age of Suspicion'' (1956), and a number of radio and stage plays have not distracted her from her steady purpose to seek out the most delicate of impressions that lie in the unnamed corners of consciousness. Written just as Mme. Sarraute entered her 80's, ''Childhood'' recounts her early years up to the eve of World War I (she was born in 1900) in a style closely tied to that of her novels. She has constructed it more scenically than narratively out of 71 short vignettes. They capture finely shaded details of place and person as well as the feelings of a precocious child torn between divorced parents and their two homes. In these beautifully paced pages the reader

The United States has turned away from nuclear power so decisively that it has forsaken its global dominance of the technology, according to experts in this country and abroad. The abandonment of the technology, made incrementally by the decisions of scores of independent utilities but just as completely as if Congress had written it into law, could have serious consequences if economic and political circumstances in the 1990's prompt a resurgence in orders for new nuclear plants, industry experts say. Experts differ on the broad issue of whether nuclear energy represents a technology important to the world's future, as computers or gene-splicing are believed to be, or a dead end. While scores of plants have fallen by the wayside, some analysts say that the need for electric energy is going to grow rapidly in coming years and that the cost of fossil fuels to make the power will rise, trends that would put the United States at a disadvantage. And if it sought to return to nuclear power by the middle of the next decade, proponents and opponents of reactors agree, the United States, the pioneer in the field, would probably have to import the designs and components from countries with continuing experience in the field, such as France or Japan.