[In the following review, West offers favorable evaluation of Ghosts in the Mirror.]

Recently, during a panel discussion on Parisian television, a French novelist plucked out the earpiece of his headset and tossed it across the set at me; of course, being tethered, the earpiece merely rebounded.

Such antics seemed a long way from my no doubt severe notion of a French novelist, at least one of the 20th century. Consider, for example, Alain Robbe-Grillet, deviser and austere high priest of the French “new novel” that emerged in the 1950s, who used such works as The Voyeur (1955) and Jealousy (1957) to reveal the novel as a form in search of itself, emerging in his version as objective and non-psychological, rather like an inventory or timetable of plot-refuting and character-denying images of hard, inscrutable, untragic things.

Mr. Robbe-Grillet, the epitome of rational poise and calibrated steadiness, would never have tried such a stunt; instead, a voluminously described raspberry would have arrived in my mail, inviting me to respond with even more relentless philatelic finality, as if truth were a feat of exhaustion.

Scrupulously impersonal, in his novels at least, Mr. Robbe-Grillet won a reputation for meticulous, patient accuracy by cultivating sheer indefatigability of the eye, as if to imply that fiction cannot be based upon, cannot be, anything slovenly or vague. Mr. Robbe-Grillet maintains that the novelist has nothing to say and might as well make a good job of describing the world instead. He sees the novelist as a top-notch phenomenologist, untouched by the egotistical sublime.

Here, however, comes Mr. Robbe-Grillet baring his heart, exposing the lyrical and rather lilting soul we suspected was there all along, behind those solemn and strict nouveaux romans of his. Surprisingly enough, the means of this revelation is the first volume of a projected three-book memoir, which ranges from Brest to the Rue Gassendi in Paris, from New York's Bleecker Street to the Jura Mountains to Istanbul.

The prose manner is controlled, of course, but almost voluptuous and, throughout, lush, ripe and luminously intuitive. Mr. Robbe-Grillet still disdains metaphor, but he revels in sensuous describing, as if the people of his own life had conferred upon him license to plumb and guess, to sample their interior lives with eclectic fondness, not as copiously as Nathalie Sarraute, an other but very different pioneer of the French new novel, does in her books of “sub-conversation,” yet much more than is usual with him.

Mr. Robbe-Grillet still mistrusts “adjectivity,” as he calls it, after Roland Barthes, and the thick prose of Zola, but he does allow one phobia into view: from the beginning of the 1940's, he “couldn't listen to ‘Pelléas’ or ‘Tristan’ without feeling instantly uplifted by the insidious, perilous surge of the sea, then sucked reluctantly into the heart of an unknown, unstable, irrational liquid universe ready to engulf me.” Look at the adjectives there.

Without laboring it, Mr. Robbe-Grillet makes the point on every page that good prose must be at least as detailed as the world it seeks to evince or supplant, whether the writer is guessing or just reporting. Take this passage about a 1951 trip to Turkey, for example—mauve if not purple, and essentially celebrational: “Caïques sailing up the Golden Horn through the lengthening rays of the setting sun; the main street of Pera already lit by signs for dancing girls in the soft twilight and the floods of silent men in dark robes; the Galatasaray lycée where sugary, nostalgic melodies alla turca throbbed, lulling us to sleep in the big white marble dormitories.”

Nevertheless, Mr. Robbe-Grillet remains the detached observer who began writing his first novel in 1948 while working at a biology laboratory, “taking vaginal smears every eight hours from hundreds of sterile rats injected with urine from mares in foal.” But he seems to be mellowing his effects, ushering in sentence after sentence in a procession that resembles a conga of gorgeous animals.

The most vivid and moving writing in this relaxed, well-tempered book is about Mr. Robbe-Grillet's parents. Although they lived in Paris, the author's father and mother shuttled regularly between the Jura (his father's home ground) and the countryside near Brest (to the home of his maternal family, where he was born in 1922).

Mr. Robbe-Grillet pays devout attention to both parents, but most of all to his mother, who once kept an ailing bat for several weeks under her blouse “in what she called her pouch,” to the horror of visitors, who watched it emerge from her white collar and spread its wings over her breast and neck. Myopic, big-nosed, she doted on tiny things (Japanese figurines made from grains of rice, for instance) and so loved all forms of animal life that, when washing watercress, she became completely sidetracked by the aquatic insects she found among the stems. She had no sense of time and, like her husband, was both anti-Semitic and an Anglophobe.

Without knowing a word of German, Mr. Robbe-Grillet's “Papa” translated Schiller's plays with gusto; he also resoled the family's shoes, worked in a cardboard box factory, had a passion for making porridge and, like his wife, subscribed to “an almost visceral atheism.”

The book evolves by sentimental convection as Mr. Robbe-Grillet drops themes only to pick them up later, creating a wafty, haphazard atmosphere. With so many good things to get to, he sometimes tries to attend to them all at the same time; the effect is of a book long resisted and then allowed to burst forth, ebullient and chiming.

In addition to plenty of crackling gunfire about the stodginess of the 20th-century novel, Mr. Robbe-Grillet offers commentary on Barthes, Camus and Sartre; memories of starting out as a fiction writer; and a dispersed portrait of Henri de Corinthe—a nebulous, mythic family visitant, a Wagnerian Nazi, sometimes a mummy stripped of its wrappings, sometimes a Breton horseman out of legend who lived alone in an old gun emplacement and bore a double puncture on the back of his neck.

This is all solid material, required reading for Robbe-Grillet buffs, but the nonspecialist reader, whose awareness of the nouveau roman may by now have waned, is going to remember the family, the seagoing forebears; the scene of Mr. Robbe-Grillet and his father renting a wheel-barrow to haul a sack of coal across wartime Paris the affectionate sketch of Mr. Robbe-Grillet's uncannily young-looking wife, Catherine, who, along with the author, survived the crash of an Air France Boeing 707 in 1961; and the days of Mr. Robbe-Grillet's forced labor during World War II in Nuremberg, Germany, where he worked as a lathe operator in an armaments factory and began to make his own steel chess set.

Several times Mr. Robbe-Grillet reminds us that language, that uniquely human thing, is subjective to begin with and can never with utter authority reveal the nature of anything. There is fiction among the facts of this memoir, as he admits. Breastfed until the age of 2, playing with china dolls bound hand and foot for sexual rituals, he comes across as a dreamer, a conjurer, an uncontriving eccentric.

Mr. Robbe-Grillet's latest book has all the amenity of For a New Novel: Essays on Fiction, and some other qualities too, once latent and implicit in his work but now in the open for amazement and study. When his novel La Maison de rendez-vous appeared in 1965, The Times Literary Supplement of London observed that Mr. Robbe-Grillet had become a gifted pornographer; Ghosts in the Mirror also shows him in a new role, that of gifted rhapsodist, akin to the Albert Camus of the North African essays.

Jo Levy's translation is winning and artistic. I wonder why this book, which was originally published in France in 1984, has taken so long to appear in English.