Though many facts seem not so much got down as left discreetly floating [in Jean Rhys's "Smile Please"], this truncated effort at self-revelation is attractive, to us if not to its author, in part because of its slim, provocative fragmentariness. In truth, the fragment, the sketch, the unfinished canvas, and the shattered statue are all congenial to an age of relativity, indeterminacy, and agnosticism. Most of the oppressively complete books that labor for our attention would benefit, we suspect, from a few reductive blows of the hammer. In the case of "Smile Please," the hammer was applied by Miss Rhys's habitual reticence and perfectionism, and by the furies that made all her attempts at composition in later life difficult.

Even so, admirers of Jean Rhys's amazing fiction—amazing in its resolute economy of style and in its illusionless portrait of a drifting heroine; a portrait that the recent...