Françoise Sagan's seems to me a strictly literary reality. Her world is peopled by characters with little identity beyond their superficial sophistication and the emotional problems attributed to them. It is a world of women anxious to discard lovers, of men seeking to discard mistresses, of older women with gigolos, even of husbands with (or so it seems) male lovers. We find them traveling, in trains or cars; they indulge in stalking weekends in Bavaria. The short stories in Silken Eyes make up an assortment of tantalizing scenarios. In "The Lake of Loneliness" Prudence Delvaux, returning on a November evening from a pleasant weekend with friends, stops her car and goes for a walk by the lake. Her thoughts turn one moment to drowning and the next to her lover in Paris. He is "a man called Jean-François"—that is apparently all we need to know...