Whatever happened to Françoise Sagan? Were all those books we read under the desk really as hollow as Sunlight on Cold Water [British title of A Few Hours of Sunlight]? No characterisation, invalid motivation, meretricious conclusions clothed in linguistic banality (revealed in translation), the epigrams jutting like desperate crampons for the author's assault on the slopes of significance—this flabby tale of provincial freshness destroyed by metropolitan decadence is timeless, placeless and baseless.

Mary Borg, "War Games: 'Sunlight on Cold Water'," in New Statesman (© 1971 The Statesman & Nation Publishing Co. Ltd.), Vol. 82, No. 2118, October 22, 1971, p. 562.

The trouble with La Sagan (one of the troubles) is not so much that her world is so phenomenally limited, as that she seems unable to imagine that any sort of viable life could take place outside it. "Wouldn't the people who travel second class or in caravans prefer a thousand times to...