SOURCE: "A Life Cut Short," in The Women's Review of Books, Vol. VIII, No. 6, March, 1991, p. 14.

In the following favorable assessment, Caldwell offers a thematic discussion of Cleaned Out, noting Ernaux's emphasis on loss and alienation.

In the loneliness of her dorm room, a university student waits to expel the results of a back-alley abortion and simultaneously passes her life in review. This unconventional voice, speaking the unspeakable, comes from the first novel of Annie Ernaux, who is best known in France for a book written about her father (La Place, published … in 1984), which won the Prix Renaudot. She has also written a bestseller about her mother [Une Femme, 1988]. If Cleaned Out (originally published … in 1974 as Les Armoires vides) is the first of Ernaux's books to be published in English in the United States, it may be less for chronological reasons than because there is something in the...