Over the years Doinel has drifted away from both Truffaut and Leaud, and now [in Love on the Run] he seems less a coherent character than a construct around which episodes involving memory and desire can be enacted. Doinel has finally written a novel, which, though not a big seller, has won him a minor literary prize. He is still hanging by his fingernails to residence in an increasingly upper-class Paris, but neither Truffaut nor Doinel seem to notice the changing atmosphere around them. Truffaut has never tried to pass himself off as a social seismograph, and Doinel, like Truffaut, is too much a self-made man and an autodidact to indulge in the romantic fantasies of the university-bred left….

His life is beginning to form a recognizable pattern, and it is too far removed from the pathological design of The Man Who Loved Women. Doinel, like Truffaut, also...