SOURCE: “Marguerite Duras,” in An Artificial Wilderness: Essays on 20th-Century Literature, William Morrow and Company, Inc., 1987, pp. 163-70.

In the following essay, originally published in the Boston Phoenix in 1985, Birkerts discusses the minimalistic prose of The Lover.

Minimalism is, for the practitioner, one of the more seductive literary modes. Like abstract painting, it looks easy, and as most of the action takes place in the realm of the unstated, the writer need not be bothered with the messy mechanics of plot or character development. Hemingway bewitched several generations of prose stylists with his primer-simple narratives and his aesthetic of exclusion: the unstated emotion, he maintained, can pack as much of a wallop as the stated one. In his hands the technique often worked—the early stories and novels, especially, quiver with repressed materials; but his legion of imitators the world over have given understatement a bad name. Few...