Word: grillet
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France's Alain Robbe-Grillet believes in the cult of impersonality. The "new novel," with which he made large literary waves during the '50s, said goodbye to psychology and presented people and their actions as reflected in surface appearances and objective happenings. In 1961 he wrote the haunting, memorable Last Year at Marienbad, a movie in which it was marvelously impossible to tell who (if anyone) was doing what (if anything) to whom, let alone...
Since the decline of literary existentialism, French fiction has been dominated by four authors-Robbe-Grillet, Sarraute, Butor and Duras-who write the anti-roman, the non-novel in which characters are impersonal, time floats out the window, and action is as fragmented as a cracked kaleidoscope. The casual reader may well have trouble telling one anti-novelist from another, but in the case of Marguerite Duras, the problem is simple: she is the only natural writer. The others construct fiction to demonstrate a pet theory. She writes about people and their moods with incomparable ease and sensuality...
France's no-longer-new New Novelists have found few imitators in the U.S. James Salter, 40, is one of the exceptions. His model seems to be Alain Robbe-Grillet, who labors in his books to "construct a space and time purely mental, that of a dream or memory." Perhaps in tribute, Salter sets his third book in France. His subject is the love affair between Anne-Marie Costallat, an 18-year-old who looks like a child but eats like a dock hand, and young Phillip Dean, a Yale dropout who has been wandering through Europe with "that...
...winds up as woman. More recently, lohn Fowles's The Magus dealt with a girl who was possibly 1) a ghost, 2) a nymphomaniac, 3) an actress, or 4) twins. Peter Israel's The Hen's House is filled with shifting symbolic identities, and Alain Robbe-Grillet's La Maison de Rendez-vous is peopled with so many polyperses that the reader has to beat them off with a stick...
...time and region. In Albert Camus' The Renegade, his great moral force triumphs over impressionistic style. But Stories and Texts for Nothing, III, Samuel Beckett's abstract exercise in vocalized nihilism, is a dud. So also is Secret Room, by France's modish Alain Robbe-Grillet, a montage of quasi-photographic fragments that is merely abstract and fatally a bore...