During his youth and for much of his adult life, Claude Mauriac enjoyed the privileges and suffered the handicap of his father's fame. As the son of François Mauriac, celebrated Catholic novelist and member of the Académie Française, Claude Mauriac rubbed shoulders at an early age with such luminaries as André Gide, Jean Cocteau, Paul Claudel, Georges Duhamel, Louis Aragon, Marcel Jouhandeau, Jules Romains, Francis Ponge, and Paul Valéry, among others. These acquaintances provided the subject matter for early books of criticism and personal reminiscence. At the same time his father's renown hampered the young Mauriac in his desire to write. Unwilling to tread on his father's turf, he tried his hand at everything but fiction--literary criticism, journalism, film reviews, and a private journal which he kept from age fourteen on. When he composed his first novel, in 1957, Claude...