[Françoise Sagan's] remarkable gift as a writer is that, walking a thin line between trash and serious literature, she can accomplish both at the same time….

In [The Wonderful Clouds] Mlle. Sagan pursues her usual theme of troubled love, but this time the two lovers are more than usually sick, sick. Alan, the young American husband, tortures himself and his French wife, Josée, by his jealous imagination of her past loves; and she in rebellion goes out of her way to take on depressing lovers just to give his imagination substance….

Alan, rich, boyishly handsome, with a Freudian complex about his mother, is a composite of nearly all the anti-American clichés that now circulate in Paris. But just as you are about to fling the book away as pure tripe, you realize that Mlle. Sagan has also caught something subtle and true about the impossible...