SOURCE: "Who Can Explain It? Who Can Tell You Why?" in The New York Times Book Review, October 24, 1993, p. 9.

James reviews films for The New York Times. In the following, she praises Ernaux's examination of obsession and emotion in Simple Passion, but laments her use of and focus on self-conscious language.

Perhaps only in France—the country that made cultural icons of Roland Barthes and Jerry Lewis, Simone de Beauvoir and Coco Chanel—could the slender autobiographical fictions of Annie Ernaux have become best sellers. Simple Passion, a memoir of a writer's obsessive affair with a shadowy married man, is part semiotic treatise and part Harlequin romance, and all the better for the combination of high and low. One of the hottest books in France last year, it embraces the crazed adolescent behavior that can crop up at any age, yet is intelligent enough to wrap those details...