SOURCE: “Mirror, Mirror …,” in New Statesman & Society, November 4, 1988, p. 31.

In the following review, Wood offers tempered assessment of Ghosts in the Mirror. “Fortunately,” writes Wood, “the writing itself is better than the pompous theory.”

The New Novel in France was a lingering cross-channel stab at modernism, hampered in many ways by the assumptions it thought it was toppling. But it understood very well the interest of reported obsessions, and the way the wildest obsessions can hide in the tidiest, most rational-seeming of discourses.

In this book Alain Robbe-Grillet mentions a painting by Marc Tansey, held in the Museum of Modern Art in New York, which shows the writer in a desert of cultural rubble. It's called Robbe-Grillet cleansing everything in sight. Robbe-Grillet likes the picture, accepts the charge. He does collect details, miniatures, miscellaneous objects, does long for the order which will result from their classification. Yet he...