Volume 18, Number 10 · June 1, 1972
Refrigerated Dreams
By John Weightman
Project for a Revolution in New York
by Alain Robbe-Grillet, translated by Richard Howard
Grove Press, 192 pp., $1.65 (paper)
Since 1955, when I spent a happy week at the Château d'Eu in Normandy listening to some of the practitioners of the French New Novel, then in the springtime of their fame, expressing their anti-Balzacian views among the imperial, and utterly Balzacian, bric-à-brac of the Orléans-Braganza family, I have puzzled intermittently over this relatively recent artistic phenomenon. The New Novel has been one of the major events during my career—or accidental involvement—as a teacher of French, and I have quite failed to respond to it in any positive way. Ought I to resign, or do they also serve who expound their own obtuseness? I hope so, because I have proved almost as insensitive as a French classicist reacting to the Romantic movement between 1820 and 1830.
Review, 4033 words
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