The French "New Novel," although still an amorphous entity very difficult to define, is now old enough to have produced a second generation of exponents, among whom I would place [J.M.G. Le Clézio and Monique Wittig], who have been the most widely acclaimed young writers to appear during the last two or three years. La Fièvre, a collection of short stories written in the "New Novel" manner, is Le Clézio's second book….

M. Le Clézio and Mlle. Witting are, temperamentally, very different from each other, the former being very neurotic and, indeed, perhaps too overtly anguished to fit entirely into the "New Novel" pattern, the latter robust and commonsensical, in so far as a writer of this kind can believe in commonsense. Neither, however, tries to any extent to achieve objectification in created "characters"; both occasionally seem to be describing named people from the outside, but this is merely a way of avoiding the monotony or inaccuracy of saying "I" all the time. Their theme is the fluctuation of their own inner awareness, the mystery of identity, the impossibility of coinciding with being and, in this respect, they derive, of course, like a good part of the "New Novel," from Existentialist psychology. Each consciousness is, at once or successively, subject and object; it can only know itself as subject by turning itself into object; and then again, when an object is contemplated intensively, it surges back into, and swamps, the subject…. Le Clézio is so convinced that the drama of the consciousness's relationship with itself is the central problem for the writer that he looks upon the traditional literary genres as out-of-date devices corresponding to mistaken concepts….

Literature becomes, then, the meandering monologue, or internal dialogue, of the subjective-objective consciousness. (p. 24)

[Le Clézio tries], with naive honesty, to extend the description of the alienated consciousness that was already carried a long way in Sartre's La Nausée and Camus's L'Etranger. His "New Novel" aspect is that he disregards all social and political problems and fills a good deal of space with dogged enumerations of physical details, as if the only thing the consciousness can do in certain moments of stress is to relieve the ache of its anonymous void by close attention to the discrete particulars of the external world…. By "fever," Le Clézio means more or less the same thing as Sartre's "nausea," i.e., contingency sickness, the vertigo which arises from persistent contemplation of the central point of non-comprehension. Now and again, there are hints that the vertigo might suddenly turn into ecstasy, as if the nothingness of the creature might be unexpectedly transformed into fullness through communion with God. But these mystic intimations are slight and, in any case, are not accompanied by any metaphysical comment…. [However, Le Clézio's] writing is, as yet, on the verge of the clinical, as if he were just managing to hold in check some serious psychic disturbance which may have more to it than Existentialist nausea. Hence, as one reads him, a strong impression of claustrophobia, which combines with the usual, oppressive solipsism of the "New Novel." But he is undoubtedly a talent with remarkable possibilities. (pp. 25-6)