[It] has remained quite easy to treat Simon as a naturalist, as a novelist who insists on writing about something and has never wholly accepted the generalities or the austerity of the nouveau roman's extremists.

The fact remains, however, that in his mature novels Claude Simon has moved very close to the theoretical standpoint of the other New Novelists. He has not strayed from or diluted the ideological position which he held when he started out as a novelist, with Le Tricheur…. But he no longer conveys this position in the same way; he has gone over, in fact, from being an explicit writer, ready to conceptualize his philosophy in an abstract language, to being an implicit one, whose philosophy must be deduced from its objective configurations in the minds of his fictional narrators. This important transition from one narrative mode to the other can be dated...