Mathias, in Robbe-Grillet's Le Voyeur, sees and/or creates figure-eights wherever he goes. Seagulls form the pattern overhead, bits of string fall into it underfoot, iron rings on docks form it before his eyes, even his bicycle trip around the island falls naturally into two joined loops, a figure-eight. The murder which he may or may not have committed takes place on a blank page between Section 1 and Section 2; in the spatial context of the island and his trip around it, it takes place at the point where the line drawn in forming a figure-eight crosses itself, and in the first French edition that page is numbered 88. Mathias is of course an obsessed figure; what he is pre-programmed to see and do he sees and does. But some of these figure-eights never impinge on his consciousness at all, and most of those that he does notice don't tell us anything about his surroundings or him, except that there are a lot of free-floating figure-eights in the vicinity of both. In the classical economy of the novel, this kind of distraction would destroy a variety of author-reader relations, a shared trust which the author's proceedings and the reader's learned responses aimed to build. The new-style novel implies a measure of antagonism and mistrust to begin with; a fixed relation between author and reader is avoided, and the grid or pattern is a kind of pseudo-structure, serving to unsettle and complicate that relation. It is pseudo, not in terms of the author's beliefs, which may be utterly sincere, but in terms of the workings of the fiction, defined in the old way, of course, as action, character, representation. But as the reader's engagement with these old friends diminishes, so it becomes more involved with the texture of the author's construct—not with the author as public spokesman, but with the author's personal game. (pp. 46-7)

Intrepid admirers of M. Robbe-Grillet or of the "new" novel, or of both, might conceivably read "Topology of a Phantom City" with interest, but most readers will undoubtedly find its strained affectlessness crushingly soporific. Consider, for example, how M. Robbe-Grillet sets the stage for his imaginary city: "The first thing that is striking is the height of the walls: so high, so disproportionate to the size of the figures it does not even occur to you to wonder whether or not there is a ceiling; yes: the extreme height of the walls and their bareness; the three that are visible, constituting the back and two sides of the rectangular, possibly square (it is hard to say because of a powerful perspective effect), possibly even cube-shaped cell (which again raises the problem of the improbably existence of a ceiling) …" (p. 112)

The New Yorker (© 1978 by The New Yorker Magazine, Inc.), February 27, 1978.