[It is clear from La Chamade] that Miss Sagan has not shifted her ground or broadened her interests. She is still a player of boudoir chess, employing differing gambits, combinations and endgames within a restricted field…. But what lifts her above the merely clever romancer or vendor of glossy sensation are her extraordinary skill and—within a narrow range—her concern with emotional truth….

The tristesse that the heroine welcomed at the end of Miss Sagan's first novel and that persists through her books still has about it some smack of literary attitude; but this … does not mean it is untrue. To live in a literary attitude, to filter experience through a spectrum of assumptions, is no less life than to live on a direct simple confrontation of experience; and the former doubtless reflects Miss Sagan's milieu more accurately than the latter. One definition of modern consciousness is...