"Terra Amata" carries its character, Chancelade, from cradle to the grave. Steps in this progress are marked by lyrical essays, punctuated with vapid conversation, Whitmanesque lists of names, words, events and cosmic ruminations. For the burden of the book is that man is born, lives and dies, and that his life is meaningless. He is pushed out by the generation that comes after him, he leaves no impress on the world; he ages before his life is fulfilled. Better not to have been born, etc.

These adolescent outpourings sound like cries of woe between bites of eclair. There is nothing in the novel to indicate that Chancelade is worth listening to. He has done nothing, suffered nothing, experienced nothing to make him worth our regard. Sure, life is bitter, brutish, short. It needs no simpering hero come from France to tell us this. But it is how he responds to this fact that gives us a measure of a man. With Chancelade you feel not so much that the world has failed him as that the salesman has not been able to get him the right color for his car.