Surface Without Depth

The difficulty in establishing a literary school is that someone is always cutting class. Novelist Nathalie Sarraute, dean of women of the French school known as the New Realist, inveighs against psychological novels, yet psychologizes in her own works. Her cofounder, Novelist Alain Robbe-Grillet, is an object worshiper who would rather describe a love seat than a love scene; yet this is not consistently reflected in the novels of his disciples. They do have some common characteristics, notably a way of writing in flat tones of a world that is bleak arid joyless, where people lead lives hollow of meaning, sensing dimly--or failing to sense--that they are victims of existence. Very little happens; predicaments are preferred to events, and orderly progression of time, clear distinction between reality and hallucination are likely to be missing.

None of this is dazzlingly new; Kafka clearly is a grandfather of the movement, and Sartre and Camus are at least unacknowledged uncles. New Realism's most important idea is to show life scrubbed clean of theatricality, and in the novel's present period of torpor, the Paris insurrection cannot be ignored. Among the latest New Realism imports:

JEALOUSY, by Alain Robbe-Grillet (149 pp.; Grove; clothbound, $3.50; paperback, $1.75). The author admires cinema techniques, and his book would make an excellent art-house movie. But like his earlier work, The Voyeur (TIME, Oct. 13, 1958), it is also thoroughly irritating. A prosaic love triangle is established on a remote banana plantation--a planter (the book's nameless narrator), his wife and a neighboring plantation owner. If this were one of Paul Bowles's African novels of sin and sun, the weather would cloud up on cue, providing a timpani accompaniment to the heroine's rages. Robbe-Grillet cheerfully invents a greater fault. Obsessed by the reality of objects, he describes them endlessly, and then repeats his descriptions--a column that casts a shadow, a squashed centipede, the location of a window, of a garden. In one maddening three-page section, he explains carefully the shape of the banana fields, the number of rows in each field, how many trees stand in each row. Such writing is not merely capricious; the looming fact of the plantation's physical existence is established--for whatever readers remain. Lost among the bananas and a time sequence that flickers eerily through past, present and future is a murder. It is dealt with in half a paragraph.

MARTEREAU, by Nathalie Sarraute (250 pp.; Braziller; $3.75). This novel, by the author of the diamond-hard Portrait of a Man Unknown (TIME, Aug. 4, 1958), suggests that reality, like a geometer's plane, has only surface, no depth. A young male invalid, living with his rich aunt and uncle, develops an obsessive womanish curiosity about manners and motives. He becomes acute enough to predict the exact course of his relatives' household skirmishing, and concludes therefore that he understands the skirmishers. His error does not matter until he begins analyzing Monsieur Martereau, a family friend--a steady, solid-seeming fellow who agrees to buy a house for the uncle. Martereau drives the young man to distraction by his oxlike simplicity. "Words are not for him what they are for me," the invalid muses, "thin protective capsules that enclose noxious germs--but hard, solid objects . . . it's useless to open them up . . we should find nothing." Gradually, the young man detects--or invents--complications; is Martereau a swindler? He forces subtleties on the unyielding surface of reality; an adulterer, perhaps? Having posed her enigma, the author of this excellently written novel disappointingly leaves it for the reader to solve.

THE SQUARE, by Marguerite Duras (118 pp.; Grove; clothbound, $3.50; papperback, $1.45). A nursemaid meets a man in a village square; they talk, while the child plays, of how it is possible to go on living. The man travels about selling five-and-dime notions from a suitcase. He is able to live, he says, because he is without hope; his life will not change, and he does not mind. The girl, on the other hand, endures a dreary job because she lives in hope of finding a husband. Life is bleak for each of them; he lives from meal to meal, and she trots resolutely to the dance hall each Saturday to continue her implacable man hunt. In the end, things look brighter. She exchanges a bit of hope for a crumb of knowledge; he gives knowledge for hope. There is even a suggestion that they may meet at the dance hall the following Saturday. The novel has its charm--a disconcerting quality in a New Realist book--but the woman's magazine touch at the end does not befit it.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.