SOURCE: “A Phenomenologist Bares His Heart,” in The New York Times Book Review, January 27, 1991, p. 24.

In the following review, West offers favorable evaluation of Ghosts in the Mirror.

Recently, during a panel discussion on Parisian television, a French novelist plucked out the earpiece of his headset and tossed it across the set at me; of course, being tethered, the earpiece merely rebounded.

Such antics seemed a long way from my no doubt severe notion of a French novelist, at least one of the 20th century. Consider, for example, Alain Robbe-Grillet, deviser and austere high priest of the French “new novel” that emerged in the 1950s, who used such works as The Voyeur (1955) and Jealousy (1957) to reveal the novel as a form in search of itself, emerging in his version as objective and non-psychological, rather like an inventory or timetable of plot-refuting and character-denying images of hard, inscrutable, untragic...