SOURCE: A review of Cleaned Out, in The Bloomsbury Review, Vol. 13, No. 1, January-February, 1993, pp. 4, 18.

Haber is a teacher of philosophy and women's studies. In the following review, she discusses Cleaned Out as a book about the "culturally disenfranchised."

Annie Ernaux's novel Cleaned Out is more than a powerful evocation of the class system in France in the 1950s and of one woman's struggle to move up in the class hierarchy and forget her past. It is also a novel that serves as a haunting contribution, both in subject matter and literary form, to the project of the culturally disenfranchised speaking in their own voice.

The novel is an extended interior monologue in which 20-year-old Denise Lesur looks back at her childhood hoping to exorcise her demons and to gain some insight into the woman she has become, a woman who, despite her extraordinary academic achievements, has still not...