SOURCE: "Theory of Relativity," in VLS, No. 30, September, 1992, p. 17.

Levine is an American journalist and nonfiction writer. In the following excerpt, she lauds Ernaux's focus on language, class, and familial relationships in A Man's Place.

The class mobility of a family's first educated child is a story of hope and betrayal, pride and uneasy rivalry, and often filial guilt. Annie Ernaux's A Man's Place tells this story in the spare and uninflected language that characterizes the writer's work—here felicitously translated from the French by Tanya Leslie. Ernaux's narrative-splintering self-interrogations admit to the memoirist's intrinsic unreliability; they solidify, rather than undermine, the reader's trust, making A Man's Place a work of ruthless authenticity.

A Man's Place (La Place, 1983) is the second half of Ernaux's memoir of her parents, the maternal side of which was published in English as A Woman's Story last year. Like the previous memoir, this...