I'm still uncertain about Françoise Sagan…. [It's] an uneasy, foreign respect—the sort one feels for minor, inscrutable Japanese arts such as Noh or sand-gardening—that is roused in me by her chaste arrangements of small glass people. Perhaps it is a hostile English reverence for her ruthless French ability to incarnate a consistent theoretic psychology…. Mlle Sagan is bleakly at home with the fact of our formlessness: with the knowledge that consciousness rests like scum on a sluggish liquid whose most definite motions are the dim tides of habit. Her people drift noncommittally through life like those toy boats with camphor tied behind, veering away from any solid contact. They lie abed postponing decisions, surrender to each other to avoid saying yes or no, and make love to avoid knowing whether it is love they are making….

Mlle Sagan strips her plot [in Aimez-vous Brahms …] to...