["Residential Quarter"] is very uneven in quality. Aragon has much talent: his power of description is remarkable, his virtuosity brilliant, his style nervous and swift. He keeps the complicated strands of his oversize novel well in hand; sweeps the reader along, achieves excitement, terror, and emotional stress. But his novel is marred by gratuitous obscenity and a ribald vulgarity that detracts from its serious purpose as a social commentary…. In Edmond's thoughtless affair with an elderly professor's wife and its inexorable aftermath of sordid tragedy, the author is dealing with realities. But he cannot stay on this ground very long; he cannot refrain from undressing humanity in public. The result is not only unedifying, it is often grotesque.

Gilbert Chase, "French Panorama," in The Saturday Review of Literature (copyright © 1938 by Saturday Review; copyright renewed © 1965 by Saturday Review; all rights reserved; reprinted by permission), Vol. XIX, No. 9, December 24, 1938. p...