A rewrite of "Robinson Crusoe?" By a Frenchman, no less? The two ideas are a little staggering at first. Then, before you know what is happening, you are involved in a fascinating, unusual novel [Friday (Vendredi)], reading with amazement page after page of a story that produced nothing but yawns among my schoolmates, when we plowed through the original by ye olde trusty moralist, Daniel Defoe….

Years ago, George Sherburn of Harvard, commenting on Defoe's middle-class masterpiece, remarked, "A modern novelist would focus on the horrors of isolation, the loneliness of Crusoe's island; for Defoe these things hardly existed: his mind as always was on the God-given power of sinful man to win through—and on the human ingenuity that embellishes the effort." This bit of academic prescience does sum up part of what Tournier has done with his Crusoe. But it is only a very small part...