[In Simon's] novels the rich sensuality and luxuriance of physical detail, the delicate arrangement of mass and shadow, the melancholy but often sumptuous appraisal of man's fleeting destiny turn the passageways of what might seem arid research into stretches of pure enjoyment. (pp. 35-6) Claude Simon, with amazing persistence and logic, combines definition and production into a single act. Step by step, from his first novel, Le Tricheur, which retains many conventional aspects, to his latest,...

[It] has remained quite easy to treat Simon as a naturalist, as a novelist who insists on writing about something and has never wholly accepted the generalities or the austerity of the nouveau roman's extremists. The fact remains, however, that in his mature novels Claude Simon has moved very close to the theoretical standpoint of the other New Novelists. He has not strayed from or diluted the ideological position which he held when he started out as a novelist, with Le Tricheur…. But he no lo...

[Leçon de choses illustrates] one manifestation of myth in recent French fiction: its displacement from the domain of the novel's content to that of its structure. Structurally, Leçon de choses (1975) is both like and unlike Claude Simon's previous novel, Triptique (1973). It is similar primarily through its tripartite nature: like Triptique, it contains not one but three "plots," each fragmented and interspersed among the bits and pieces of the other two, all of th...

Claude Simon has not reached the magnitude of Butor or Robbe-Grillet, despite the fact that his last two books, Le Vent and L'Herbe, were generally praised by the critics and translated [widely]…. There is no doubt that his technique is not as geometrically defined as Robbe-Grillet's, nor has he invented a gimmick as striking as that of Butor's La Modification, nor can any one of his works be summed up in a term as clear-cut as that of "subconversation," used to des...