In a time of permissive publishing, to end the world takes only ink and paper. Novel writing is the least expensive of handicrafts. Thus it costs next to nothing to bring before the reader's mind a giant affirmation of queer menace:

"Somewhere between earth and sky there oscillates a large, flattish object, its surface daubed with blood, apparently made of riveted and interlapping steel plates, sliding to and fro with each compression or expansion of their over-all mass, and yet very much all of a piece, easily liftable on some gigantic bar, like a curtain."

If you were making a film, and had to budget a few thousand dollars for Special Effects to fabricate one of these, you would think several times about its rhetorical necessity before writing the order. But if you're covering pages with words, you can conjure it up amidst 3,000 words about odd meteorological goings-on without taking thought at all.

Though "The Flood" exhibits considerable talent for metaphor, it is difficult to locate a passage that doesn't suffer, in this way, from encountering too little resistance. The budgetary resistance against which the film maker tests his notions isn't the only kind, of course, and has never been the operative kind for the writer unless his ambitions are defined by best-seller-dom. It's relevant to invoke it here because "The Flood" is more like a French film—Godard's "Alphaville," say—than it is like a novel.

It's film that has created the fashions on which J.M.G. Le Clézio relies for his effects: apartment-house facades, loudspeakers, graffiti; squeal of tires, uproar of jet engines; a boy obsessed with a pinball machine; a man listening to a tape-recorded suicide; a man waking next to a woman and examining her sleeping body with detached intentness.

The continuity—12 days in the life of Francois Besson—is preceded by an equivocal apocalypse that delivers the urban world into a universe of non-meaning, and followed by an equivocal eternity of blackness in which the ordinary carries on…. The literal cause of the blackness is that Besson has burned out his retinas by staring at the sun. A thousand verbal curlicues admonish us, however, not to be so square as to focus on the literal….

[Has Besson been attempting to] live a meaningful life, presumably? But, if so, it's no surprise that he can't. He's been acting, we can only believe, at the whim of the writer, in the course of this protracted fictional doodle. For what metaphysic can we extract from a doodle? Only that the pencil seeks its own amusement, in pursuit of little local virtuosities.

The authority of the camera, that's what's lacking: the stubborn resistance of the real, of faces and bodies asserting their identity through whatever arbitrariness of scripting and editing. Dimly at Mr. Le Clézio's shoulder stands some such wraith as the Godard of "My Life to Live," a film whose 12 episodes triumph over such dialogue as "Life is … life" and "I wish I were someone else" and "The more you talk, the less it means." Godard's episodes are even better served by such dialogue than they would be by more resonating language, precisely because we can see bodies, faces, clothes, movements, rooms, cars, a city: all real. In "The Flood," because it is a book, all reality is dissolved into words, words. (p. 4)

The arc of a man's passion, exactly that, is what we miss in "The Flood." Through the words, as in Beckett, we discern the airless humdrum. But behind the words, as not in Beckett, we detect not a disciplined sensibility, with a point of view about the airless humdrum and about the nature of the obligation to describe it, but simply a young Midas, a Midas enabled by syntax and by the dictionary to create fashionable vistas inexpensively, at the touch of the pen. Feats of creation, feats of annihilation, ought to be harder than he makes them look. (p. 40)