[In "Bonjour Tristesse," Françoise Sagan's] voice was cool, precise, self-confident and individual. She could not have developed it; it was a gift. The stir it created spread from the literary world to the general public, especially to the young, who thought they heard themselves in it. Mlle. Sagan became rich and famous—and she continued to write novels.

In her fifth, "The Wonderful Clouds," the prose voice is still there, cool, precise and self-confident. It is not as individual as it was, if only because it has been heard in four other novels, but it still possesses that vital quality of holding the reader's attention. "This is something interesting which only I can tell you about," it quietly asserts. "Listen."…

[The setting, Paris,] is an arid world for the development of a born writer, which is what Françoise Sagan is.

Self-indulgence runs like a theme song...