The astonishing thing about Nathalie Sarraute's Childhood is that it takes a style which for 30 years has been associated with the dissolution of character and narrative, unites it with a subject that readers inevitably sense as real, chronological, human, and psychological—just like the subjects of those conventional books that all Sarraute's work opposes—and through this opposition creates an autobiography which seems true through and through. Not just factual and emotionally straightforward, but true to the processes of memory and of writing. As an avant-garde autobiography, Childhood makes a persuasive ease for the claim that antinaturalistic writing is the most realistic writing….

After 50 years of developing the means to catch, clarify, and reproduce the inner movements of others, Sarraute has used her enormous resources to pin down the precise movements in her inner and outer life as a child that impelled her to write, and to write...