For ["A Certain Smile"] the author of "Bonjour Tristesse" has chosen a theme closer to experience, less armored in adolescent dream, and consequently a good deal more familiar than that of her sensational success of two years ago. Again we are exploring the shifting territory that lies between the generations, again our protagonist is a young girl the same age as her creator. But Dominique, if less original than Cecile, the bad seed of "Bonjour Tristesse," is more believable. Her story is more of a novel and less of a tour de force.

As an indication of Mlle. Sagan's future. I find this heartening. "Bonjour Tristesse" was a precocious book. It stamped a pattern of impossible, though amusing, events upon reality in a teen-age dream of wickedness, seduction, sophistication and power—for Cecile controlled and manipulated the adults about her at will. Her story was pure wish-fulfillment, carried off by the intensity and immediacy with which it was told, but inclined, whenever the author's concentration faltered, to turn sheerly absurd. Cecile's fascination with, and rage against, the adult world—the world that is threatening to manipulate her—are very telling. But her revenge never gets out of the realm of daydream or fairytale.

In "A Certain Smile" Mlle. Sagan has placed her young heroine, Dominique, in a situation which corresponds more closely with reality. Like Cecile, Dominique's central experience is of contact with the adult world; but it is a much more plausible contact. Indeed, Dominique's story is a retelling of one of the classic, one of the oldest, tales in the world: she falls in love with a man old enough to be her father….

Mlle. Sagan's version is valuable … on two counts. First, she manages to make the old legend moving in itself. And secondly, she tells it so honestly that the bare bones of her story indicate how the contemporary situation creates variations in the legend. (p. 1)

Mlle. Sagan is thus writing about something more than the sexual episodes which determine the actual narrative of her books; although a good part of her sensational success is no doubt due to the fact that she does write about them in some detail. One cannot absolve either book of exhibitionism. Indeed, there are times when both heroines, Cecile and Dominique, seemed to be crying insistently, "See how young I am! See how bad I can be!" This is dull, certainly, for any reader over the age of, say, 22, and if it were all that Mlle. Sagan had to say, her books could be dismissed as adolescent naughtiness. But there is more to her work than this. She is writing as well about the pathetic, greedy, touching, selfish efforts of youth to learn the rules by which the world is governed, to discover where points of pressure and centers of power are located, and how one goes about becoming part of the universe of action and event.

To tell this story Mlle. Sagan employs a style which has been highly praised, but which seems to me to have serious drawbacks. Her technique is that of setting down a series of immediate perceptions, of particular sensations…. The result is that Dominique, Luc and the rest seem to have little internal life of their own. They act without explaining themselves, and therefore they act abruptly and mysteriously. Mlle. Sagan may intend thus to convey the effect of ineluctable Fate moving among men; but the impression the reader actually receives is something different—that of a determined author manipulating her characters.

This is, I believe, a fault of youth. As Mlle. Sagan comes to trust her own ability more, she will be ready also to trust her characters to communicate her theme and convince us of it. Another youthful fault is the narrowness of her book. Stage-center, under a bright light, is Dominique. Everyone, everything else, shades off fast into darkness and dubiety. (pp. 1, 18)

This is, to sum up, a book by a young writer of talent. How much talent? Enough for her books to be moving and perceptive in spite of perhaps unavoidable sillinesses; enough for her second book to create reality more convincingly than her first. What she has already given us is worth thinking about. We have here a message elliptic, egoistic, but honest and intense, from the next generation. It is seldom, indeed, that we get such a message, for inarticulate youth, which is most youth, can only act, and then be unable to say why; and articulate youth has usually soaked itself so thoroughly in its reading, in trying to learn from the past, that it speaks more conventionally than its elders. (p. 18)