SOURCE: "Michel Tournier," in The New Yorker, Vol. LXV, No. 21, July 10, 1989, pp. 92-6.

Updike is an esteemed American novelist, short story writer, essayist, and critic whose best-known works include Rabbit, Run (1960), Picked-up Pieces (1975), and Roger's Version (1986). In the following essay, he presents an overview of Tournier's life and career and discusses The Wind Spirit, Gilles & Jeanne, and The Golden Droplet.

At around the time, in the sixties, when the intellectual innovations of Roland Barthes and Claude Lévi-Strauss and Fernand Braudel began to achieve international influence, French fiction ceased to export well. Alain Robbe-Grillet and his nouveau roman suddenly seemed just another idea, and a superficial one at that, producing novels as depthless as movies but on a much smaller screen; simultaneously, it began to appear that Francoise Sagan was not quite another Colette. Though the French literary industry has kept humming away, pining prizes on itself and...