If its author were not Françoise Sagan I doubt that Those Without Shadows …, a junior miss-sized work of fiction, would have been published in book form. My guess is that it was intended to be the opening section of a much longer work in which Mlle. Sagan lost interest. Whether or not this charitable supposition is correct, what is presented to us reads like a first act: it introduces a set of characters and their problems, and then breaks off. (p. 240)

The function of the artist is to find something that [matters]—to seek point amid the seeming pointlessness. Mlle. Sagan, unfortunately, identifies with the emptiness, the boredom, and the limp suffering of her characters. After her remarkable first book, which had a core of genuine feeling, she has slid into progressive apathy. Her present novelette has nothing to say except that life is a mess and...