"The Book of Flights" continues, with increased daring, to deconstruct the novel within itself. Notably, it is interspersed with chapters called "Self-Criticism" in which the author calls into question his procedures, casts suspicion on his enterprise, points up the various sleights-of-hard and falsification of the act of writing.

Yet Le Clézio is a curious mixture of the new sensibility, with its intense self-awareness about the fiction-making process, and an older quest for a literature of presence, significance, plentitude and even innocence. At heart, he is a romantic, obsessed by "writing's abandonment of reality, loss of meaning, logical madness"—by the loss of a language having a full grasp on things.

Really, I think, he writes out of protest against the state of affairs recognized and accepted by Robbe-Grillet or John Barth, whose works insist upon the fictionality of fictions, their inherent inadequation to the phenomenal world, their status as a supreme game where the reader's engagement with the text is the true act of significance. Le Clézio recognizes the game, indeed he plays it with talent, but he wants it to lead him through to an esthetic of presence. He wants to have his self-criticism and his innocence both, to deconstruct literature and to make it, in full romantic fashion, serve as salvation. And this, I think, accounts for the smugness and moral stridency that sometimes characterize his work. (p. 6)

Le Clézio sometimes reminds one of Godard in his creation of a certain poetry of the banal from the overwhelming clutter of the contemporary landscape, including the static of a zapped-out language. At his best, Le Clézio is ever the master at rendering existence at the level of sensation with a daring and admirable freshness of language. He conveys in many strong passages a feeling of "material ecstasy" ("L'Exstase Matérielle," he called his book of essays), a joyful penetration into the heart of things. But he lacks Godard's cool. There is too portentous an insistence that we must see, must react. We have become somewhat jaded about alienating cityscapes, hallucinatory highways and the daily apocalypses of contemporary consciousness. Le Clézio's mode is in fact perhaps too insistently the apocalyptic, which points once again to an unacknowledged disjuncture between his sophisticated suspicion of literature and his essentially romantic commitment. (pp. 6, 34)

[There] are parts of this book that are very moving.

Yet I find something ultimately self-deceptive about his writing. For all his elaborate self-consciousness about the novel, literature and language, he is not finally searching for a further expansion in our awareness of the fiction-making process—in the manner of Borges—but for a para-literature and para-language which would be adequate to the immediacy of experience and would restore our freshness of vision and response. He proclaims the futility and terminal illness of literature—only to make, surreptitiously, the highest claims for his form of it. This comes close to self-righteousness. (p. 34)