Alain Robbe-Grillet died this past week.

Who the hell is Alain Robbe-Grillet? He was a novelist and a screenwriter and on the very cutting edge back in the 1950s when there was still a discernible edge and everyone could agree the thing was being cut. He was also French, an obviousness of the scarf and the obsession with form in his writing.

Not a lot of people loved his novels. Oprah would hate them. But other writers learned a lot from them. In fact, he was the architect of the so-called nouveau roman, or the new novel, because he was looking to update narrative writing the way painting had been updated in the twentieth century. Reading now, he said, should be about the thing itself instead of about mere description of the outside world. Do away with copying and analyzing, making symbols out of coffee mugs and windows, for chrissake. Stop making metaphors! Put down instead the awarenesses of your characters, make a world, and let the reader experience the words just as he or she experiences life, creating meaning as they go. To that end, he often wrote mysteries, partly I think because the genre suited his instinctual view of art and the human condition (it’s all a fog, find your own way) and partly because mysteries have a natural velocity, which is key when the author has a major something else he’s working on with the book in addition to keeping you reading.

Below, two pages from 1955’s The Voyeur. See what you think.