Her special talent as a novelist is experience. From her ability to project she is able to infer. Even though she dramatizes she is our contemporary: Depression, the female response to male frigidity; the frigidity of the male—a denaturing of experience. Without condescension Françoise Sagan, in A Few Hours of Sunlight, aspires to a perfect judiciousness about a relationship, and she comes close to achieving her aims. She has the audacity to contrive her fiction from the point of view of a male….

Sagan's style is sparse, expository. There is a habitual tic-like use of simile and epigram; her imagination is literate, empathic. Her comment on the fact that she is writing about a seemingly liberated set ("Paris in the year of grace 1967" is a repeated catch phrase in the narrative) is consciously to take the relationship of Vronsky and Anna Karenina and reduce it to...