TheErasers, which launched RobbeGrillet's literary career and thrust him into the vortex of critical debate, exemplifies many of the characteristics of what would come to be known as the New Novel: a deviation from traditional (linear) plot structure, disordered chronology, unconvincing characterization, and a tendency toward exhaustive description of apparently insignificant objects. Although some critics viewed these characteristics as flaws in his day-in-the-life detective story, others, most notably Roland Barthes, praised the work for a kind of narrative objectivity that was more realistic than the traditional novel.

Barthes gave the term "litterature object ale" to this objective focus which, rather than providing the all-inclusive vision of an omniscient narrator, directs narrative vision away from hidden meanings and psychological depths of character, toward the surface of specific objects, without attaching to them any symbolic significance. Unlike the novels of such predecessors as Balzac, Robbe-Grillet's novel did not...