Michel Tournier is a popular novelist in the finest sense of the word. He addresses topics of general interest in a prose that makes the issues he raises readily accessible to his audience. Tournier is one of the first serious French novelists to break with the tradition of le nouveau roman, whose penchant for stylistic complexity has marked French fiction since World War II. As Tournier puts it in his autobiographical essay, Le Vent Paraclet (The Holy Spirit, 1977), his aim is not to "innover dans la forme, mais de faire passer au contraire dans une forme aussi traditionnelle, préservée et rassurante que possible une matière ne posédant aucune de ces qualités" (innovate in form, but, on the contrary, to express in a traditional and reassuring fashion material that has none of these qualities).

When he received the L...