Style, writes Proust, is in no way an embellishment … it is not even a question of technique; it is like colour with certain paintings, a revelation of a private universe which each one of us sees and which is not seen by others. The pleasure an artist gives is to make us know an additional universe.

This is handy for the heightened realities of Livia, successor to Monsieur, 'written in a highly eliptical quincunxial style invented for the occasion', set largely in the ominous late 'thirties…. The complex relationships of a group of young people are dramatized, occasionally blurred, by the fabled allusive atmospherics—the book is preceded by a Chinese proverb. 'Five colours mixed make people blind'—itself counterpointed by periodic intrusions of the squalid: an obsession with rancid armpits, a repulsive treatment of clap.

The evocations are dreamily persuasive…. Serious issues seem more explicit, the characters...