[Spanking the Maid] is a failed attempt to employ the methods of the nouveau roman; the repetitions, the variations upon images, the structural loops, the shifts in perspective, all seem wearily imitative, forced, and pretentious. Each morning a maid enters her employer's bedroom, and each morning she is spanked for her failures…. [There] is an implicit invitation to see how the book is constructed…. [However], the machinery creaks, sputters, and grinds; the tricks are telegraphed, even to the ending in which the employer and maid exchange roles. Finally, I began to suspect that some grand metaphor was rearing its ugly head. Or a fable: the man and his maid are supposed to represent the relationship between man and woman, between husband and wife, children and parents; or between artist and society, or artist and critic. No matter how well the artist does some things, so the fable might go, the critic will spank him for not doing others.
Spanking the Maid can be seen as new and inventive only if one forgets a dozen or so French novelists of the past 30 years. It is a simplification of the techniques of the French writers, and should not be viewed as much more.
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