[It] seems to me it need not trouble us that Françoise Sagan's books resemble one another as much as they do. We know that the obsession with material, the compulsion to rearrange a few simple elements in the hope that some final illumination will burst forth from them, is the compulsion of the artist. We recognize that the thin line is her form, as it was Giacommetti's, and that she reaches for it again and again. It is her problem to make each book new, though she chooses not to add to it anything much that wasn't in the last one. She is the classical artist who has fined her material down to its essence.

Though there is perhaps no detachment like French detachment, it's clear that Sagan is one of those novelists whose special talent it is to be nonreverberating. At their best, such writers produce...