[It may] be that the refusal of Wittig's Les Guérillères to act like much of a novel at all will be taken as a sign of its newness and originality. The book is about a time when women live as guerrillas, by themselves, fighting men, seeking a new age; its techniques are mostly impersonal and their aim is to achieve something like epic distance and grandeur. But though the idea of such a book may well raise high hopes in at least some readers, the book itself turns out to be, sadly, oddly, at times almost maddeningly, quite dull. (p. 23)

[Les Guérillères] has no confining or even definite point of view, and the form is simply a series of passages, ranging in length from thirty to 500 words; after every fifth or sixth passage is a page filled with women's names. Little dialogue, no continuing characters; the women we read about may be the same group throughout or they may be different; the action may take place in one spot or many; the time span may be a few months or many years. Take away all the usual novelistic ways and means and the effect almost certainly will seem as undernourished, as unfree, as the most claustrophobic of first-person novels.

But if there is no plot, there is a central fable, and that gives the book whatever newsworthiness it can claim to have. At a time apparently long after our own the women are trying to work out the terms for their own culture…. Like any revolutionary group, the women are trying to break with the past, and because their bondage was sexual, so too must be their freedom. In the early sections they are devising self-sufficient symbols of their sexual organs … and all this is replaced with more abstract symbolism, which usually takes the simple form of an O.

Things begin to change. We hear of fighting, of women in large groups and then in armies, of individual heroic feats. Gradually the women begin to think their faith in their new symbolism is misplaced: "They say that any symbol that exalts the fragmented body is transient, must disappear…. They, the women, the integrity of the body their first principle, advance marching together into another world." Many women are killed in battle, but their forces finally triumph; some young men come to join the women and are accepted as comrades; the epic battle over, a new age is born when both men and women are free.

If the fable itself does not seem attractive, then the book will seem to drag most of the time; even for those who like the central idea Wittig has not done much to sustain one's local interest. She seems not to have realized how large a burden she places on her native inventiveness when she gives up character and plot. Each section is forced to stand on its own merits because it is so little tied to anything else. When the world being described has no time or place, when the practical problems of living under guerrilla conditions are assumed to be unimportant or solved, what is going to happen?

Well, there are a few nice details that derive from the joy the women take in their freedom, and there is always the revolutionary rhetoric. But there are no difficulties; there is violence but no pain; there is language but no feeling and little thought. It would take a Dickens, a writer of great and profligate powers, to sustain the enterprise, and Wittig has very little of this kind of talent. That everything seems remote and abstract may be part of Wittig's design, but in order to create that atmosphere she has given up almost everything that could make the moment-to-moment reading interesting.

Furthermore, the central fable itself … is really only an adaptation of standard revolutionary terms and actions. The new life Wittig imagines has in it hand-clapping and feet-stomping, joy, men and women comrades together, a new age, a wind of change, a sun rising—it is embarrassing to make such a list…. There will be violence, but there will be joy. A New Something. On and on. Though it hasn't many more than thirty thousand words, it is a long novel, hard to finish.

The only fit readers of Les Guérillères are those people, probably women in late adolescence, who have not yet discovered that there are ways in which the historical and present condition of women resembles that of other oppressed groups…. Comparing the status of women to that of blacks in modern America or of peasants in the France of the ancien régime is pretty crude, and long before one reaches what is most important or interesting about any of these groups the analogies have become trite, fit mostly for galvanizing sluggish consciousnesses. The blessed advantage of the novel as a form is that it need never exist on their level at all, but when Wittig forgoes the novelistic advantages she is reduced to the trite revolutionary analogies. (pp. 23-4)

[If] the politics of the feminist movement—and it is as a small part of that politics that Les Guérillères must be considered—can be of permanent value, then one of its major achievements will be to encourage women who have much richer talents than Monique Wittig's to push aside their writing no longer and to reimagine their fate and their possibilities. (p. 24)