Le Clézio is an appealingly tedious writer; he has a knack for making you like him while he bores you…. What I admire in him is, in fact, what makes him rather tedious: his stubborn, solemn, and, until now, generally unsuccessful attempt to find the medium that will help him express (and discover) where his interest and talent as a writer lie.

This search for a form, a tone, a literary mode is only too visible in the nine stories of Fever…. (p. 4)

There is … something very unfeverish about the dogged, cerebral density of Le Clézio's descriptive writing. I find his descriptions generally far less suggestive of the immediacy of sensation than of an astonishing verbal virtuosity which Le Clézio either can't or won't direct and control. Images are confusedly piled up with what seems like the relentless, ponderous application of a schoolboy trying to outwrite the rest of the class. (pp. 4, 16)

But the main trouble with most of these stories is … that they set out to be stories and don't quite make it…. What's missing, in a variety of ways, is the distance that would make conflict—that is, drama—possible. For one thing, Le Clézio is apparently having trouble deciding what distance he himself should take from his stories. He occasionally substitutes himself for characters (as in "A Day of Old Age," when he addresses a fairly painful reminder of mortality to the reader), or, more frequently, he tries weakly to be casual about them by pretending not to be sure what's happening to them. He also gives us only the briefest glimpses into the psychological distances separating characters from one another; not one story has at its center an interesting relationship. Finally, the moment of fever often has no history. What provoked it is either obscure or unconvincing, and characters have almost no reality outside their hallucinations, in spite of Le Clézio's scrupulously naming everyone who appears and even dropping hints (which will interest you as little as they do Le Clézio) about the rest of his characters' lives….

There are, however, some successes in this collection. I liked especially the first half of "Fever" (the vagueness of the wife's role spoils the rest of the story), the impressionistic portrait of nature in "The World Is Alive," and "The Day That Beaumont Became Acquainted With His Pain." "Beaumont" is by far the best story in Fever, and this is largely because the metaphorical extravagances never become completely detached from the very clear, located reality of a toothache…. [In] conclusion I should say that a certain talent for dialogue appears each time we have someone nagging someone else. Beaumont's call to Paule, Adam Pollo trying to make Michèle talk about the time he raped her in Le Procès-Verbal, and Joseph's stubborn curiosity about what the old woman is seeing as she sits dying are all effectively uncomfortable scenes of characters hammering away at the resistance of others. The stubbornness is awful but oddly appealing, and it dramatizes, in a human relationship, the less appealing obstinacy of the descriptive passages in which Le Clézio mauls a scene metaphorically until he becomes what he sees. Characters occasionally provide the resistance and the discipline lacking when Le Clézio is, so to speak, on his own. I don't know how bright a future such a limited talent promises. For the moment, Le Clézio himself is nagging away at a literary medium in search of an answer, and this makes for a touching if not an always absorbing spectacle. (p. 16)