Difficult to classify by any of the traditional literary designations, the twenty-four short, unrelated pieces of Tropisms present fleeting glimpses of people and relationships captured as if by the camera. Each focuses on a small circumstance, a fixed moment in unidentified time, a vague place with anonymous people enmeshed in their interdependence. All that remains are the tropistic feelings and experiences of humanity in general, in the true classical tradition that the French have always understood well. Like other twentieth-century writers in France and elsewhere, there is also the expression of universal existential anguish.

Each individual is condemned to perpetual solitude, yet needs other human beings, which leads to some sacrifice of the self that causes further anguish from which the average person seeks escape. In order to camouflage and even entirely suppress this anguish, most people chatter constantly in conventional language.

Much of Sarraute's later...