[The essay from which this excerpt is taken originally appeared in The Massachusetts Review in Autumn, 1963.]

Not since Henry James have the acumen of the critic and the psychological sensitivity of the accomplished novelist been so well fused as in Nathalie Sarraute. This is particularly evident in her essays, collected as The Age of Suspicion [1963] (originally published in 1956 as L'Ère du Soupçon), which reveal her awareness of the novel both as an artistic craft and as a means of communicating "psychological reality." Here she traces the development of the psychological novel from Dostoyevsky to the present, defines her own original approach to the form and describes the fictional techniques necessary to realize this new kind of fiction. Thus these essays serve two functions: they provide a lucid analysis of the nature and practice of the psychological novel since Dostoyevsky and they also, like Henry James' Prefaces, contain the most illuminating critical discussions we have of Mme. Sarraute's own novels. (p. 544)

In her earliest novel, Tropismes (1939; reissued, 1957), Mme. Sarraute probes the psychic lives of those nouveaux bourgeoise women who have moved from the country to a Paris apartment. Since she confines herself to a single social class, she can treat the psychology of all these women as one mind and show how the innermost thoughts of each reflect the notions of all. Flickering from one mind to another, she grasps those "tropismes" (a biological term meaning the response, usually an orientation, of a plant or animal to the influence of external stimuli) which characterize these women's response to their daily routines. Although Mme. Sarraute's fictional concern wavers between lyrical description and psychological probing, although she has not yet discovered the means or the material to construct an effective fictional vision, she has already defined the direction in which her work will move—the definition of psychological depths beneath the objective surface of situation and character.

Her next novel, Portrait of a Man Unknown (1947), continues to test the hard surfaces of appearance for signs of underlying realities. The narrator, an anonymous "I," tries desperately to penetrate the motivations and characters of the alternately rough and charming father and his "hypersensitive" daughter who live in his apartment-house. Despite repeated encounters and surreptitious spyings, the narrator is unable to crack their external masks—what he thinks are moments of insight are actually nothing more than imaginative projections. Ironically, it is the narrator's own acute sensibilities, as they play over these two figures, which suggest that kind of perceptive introspection which becomes the mark of her best fiction.

Martereau (1953) is a crude attempt to define that area of psychology her later novel grasps so surely. The narrator poses his own affectionate responses to Martereau against his uncle's suspicions and his aunt's concern (perhaps adulterous) in an attempt to define the essence of this man. He succeeds only in destroying his own relationship with Martereau without ever discovering the truth of the man's character. But already we find Mme. Sarraute capturing the unspoken nuance of social encounters, for it is the barely hinted suggestions, the delicate plots and counter-plots, the constant awareness of the listener's reaction to one's statements, and the eternal anxiousness to please and satisfy which make up the real matter of this novel. Here, however, it is her sluggish words—heavy, static, defined—which keep the novel from moving forward. Only in the most recent novel are these words metamorphosed into movements which generate the form of the novel from their own energy.

The "characters" in The Planetarium [1959] are only named consciousnesses, each speaking in the first person, each rotating in his own orbit until a sudden collision throws him into contact with another and stirs his submerged thoughts and feelings into rapid turmoil. Nathalie Sarraute skillfully expands these isolated collisions in time and in relevance until the universal conflict of rebellious youth and parental authority is constructed. The basic pattern of collision is the archetype of initiation into or rejection from a defined social group. The "groups" presented vary from the writers' clique commanded by Germaine Lemaire, which the young critic Alain hopes to enter, to the familial communion which their parents wish to reestablish with Alain and Gisèle after their marriage, to the "special place" in Alain's heart which his Aunt Berthe must maintain even if it means sacrificing her apartment, to the perfect marriage which Alain and Gisèle are incapable of achieving.

It is not these social situations which make up the novel's texture, however, but the sensations aroused within the characters when they collide. Their spoken words flow smoothly, but beneath are hidden depths of half-grasped, often inarticulate, desires and fears. Mme. Sarraute suggests these barely conscious movements with a slight nuance, a fleeting metaphor, an undeveloped suggestion and, very rarely, an image as developed as the surrealist description of natives stalking their victims in the jungle which evokes the sensation of terror with which Berthe awaits the loss of her apartment. (pp. 548-50)

With The Planetarium, Nathalie Sarraute achieved that new kind of psychological novel which her critical essays describe, a novel which captures those movements which cannot be seen directly and clearly by the conscious mind, those movements which form and disintegrate with utmost rapidity "on the extreme edge of consciousness." She has internalized character, plot and description and has discarded from her form all the antiquated conventions of the traditional novel which impede the flow of these movements beneath and around the levels of spoken dialogue. She has subtly evoked complex and varied personalities and diverse social situations with which we can identify (perhaps more easily than with James' limited "drawing-room" situations). She has articulated the very real sensations which we all feel whenever we are intensely involved in an uncertain situation, the numerous and complex movements that give meaning to our actions and our words. She has taken from Dostoyevsky his sensitivity to the complicated and contradictory feelings which are never revealed in conventional dialogue and developed a new instrument—nothing more nor less than her style—to present them to the reader. But her style so deftly captures the dimly perceived pattern of our innermost lives that we, too, echo the final communion between Alain and Germaine … "I think we're all of us, really, a bit like that." (p. 552)