Claude Simon has not reached the magnitude of Butor or Robbe-Grillet, despite the fact that his last two books, Le Vent and L'Herbe, were generally praised by the critics and translated [widely]…. There is no doubt that his technique is not as geometrically defined as Robbe-Grillet's, nor has he invented a gimmick as striking as that of Butor's La Modification, nor can any one of his works be summed up in a term as clear-cut as that of "subconversation," used to describe Nathalie Sarraute's Le Planétarium.

At the same time, Simon's dense pages might well discourage those readers used to the liberal paragraphing of Françoise Sagan and the popular novelists à l'Américaine. His paragraphs often run to twelve pages or more, his sentences may continue on for three pages. Within his sentences, ordinary syntax is not respected, subordinate clauses and parentheses abound, the subject or main...