When the novelist, Romain Gary, committed suicide some months ago, he left behind [Vie et Mort d'Émile Ajar, a] small time-bomb to explode after his death and cause red faces among the members of the French literary establishment. It is an account of how, from the early 1970s onwards, he wrote four successful novels under the pseudonym of Émile Ajar, while continuing to publish other works under the name he had already long made famous…. His motive, he says, was a desire to renew himself, to escape from the persona in which the critics had imprisoned him….

Sad to say, apart from discomforting some critics who no doubt deserve to be pilloried, the book falls a little flat…. Gary, as a mature writer, simply played a prank on the Parisian literary world by using a pseudonym, but there is no fundamental difference between the Ajar books and...