Under the cover of verbal humor often taken beyond the limits of good taste, the substantial work of the French novelist Romain Gary deals with moral issues of resistance to Nazism, racial discrimination, the cruelty of war, aging, animal rights, and forgiveness. Long considered a popular writer and intellectually second-rate, Gary was taken seriously and brought within the broad scope of Holocaust literature only in the 1990s. His undying allegiance to Charles de Gaulle, the substantial wealth that he earned from high sales and big-budget movie adaptations of his works, and his long periods of residence in America and elsewhere were no doubt the main reasons for his low prestige among French critics in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s. His successful hoodwinking of the literary establishment through the invention of "Emile Ajar" also earned him much posthumous resentment in the 1980s. But the fundamental reason for Gary's unusual...