SOURCE: O'Brien, John. Review of Exteriors, by Annie Ernaux. Review of Contemporary Fiction 17, no. 1 (spring 1997): 182.

In the following review, O'Brien commends Ernaux's descriptive ability in Exteriors, calling the work “a remarkable piece of writing.”

It has always seemed to me that a great deal of “description” and “details” in novels are done a disservice by being made to serve the “story.” That is, an opening paragraph in a typical novel exists for the sake of setting up character and story, its language subservient to these, and its function finally reduced to that of background music and decoration; in other words, the point is to get past these things, to get to the story, for which these serve as introduction. In Exteriors Annie Ernaux foregrounds these materials, composing a book made up of short sections whose purpose is to isolate these details in and for themselves: phrases overheard in...