The astonishing thing about Nathalie Sarraute's Childhood is that it takes a style which for 30 years has been associated with the dissolution of character and narrative, unites it with a subject that readers inevitably sense as real, chronological, human, and psychological—just like the subjects of those conventional books that all Sarraute's work opposes—and through this opposition creates an autobiography which seems true through and through. Not just factual and emotionally straightforward, but true to the processes of memory and of writing. As an avant-garde autobiography, Childhood makes a persuasive ease for the claim that antinaturalistic writing is the most realistic writing….

After 50 years of developing the means to catch, clarify, and reproduce the inner movements of others, Sarraute has used her enormous resources to pin down the precise movements in her inner and outer life as a child that impelled her to write, and to write in her particular way. (p. 41)

Sarraute could not have written her memoir as a flat-out narrative of memory, however subtle or complex, without committing a "minor crime" against her perception of life as we know it from her other works, against the style she has evolved, against everyone's recognition that your own childhood is inevitably mythologized, revised, ahistorical. She solves this by telling her story to a questioning Other, who opens the book with the words, "Then you really are going to do that? 'Evoke your childhood memories' … how these words embarrass you," and meanly adds, "it could be that your forces are declining." (p. 42)

The partner in Childhood sometimes speaks like a friend, sometimes like an analyst (or a well-analyzed friend), a conscientious editor, or, purely, the promptings of an honest superego.

The second voice can also become a mechanical device, tsk-tsk-tsking disingenuously away: "You haven't been able to resist introducing something a little prefabricated … it's so tempting, you've inserted a pretty little piece …" The narrator defends herself, or, when nagged, admits that because she actually had a wicked stepmother, she's afraid of veering into fiction. Such lessons in conscience and technique are a little tricky and unnecessary, condescending to the reader.

On the other hand, the questioner's presence keeps us from sinking so deeply into Nathalie—wonderful child—or into Sarraute's gorgeous imagism that we forget the struggle, not just of writing the book but of thinking through any childhood. We are forced to suspend belief; the voice creates, parallel to the autobiographical narrative, an essay on the effort of memory we are all constantly making. By starting with this secondary voice, Sarraute mildly sabotages herself, only ultimately to strengthen the sense of truth, in the same way that her lack of vengefulness or whining serves to strengthen the shocking sadness of so much that happens. Most important, the technique prevents Sarraute from recreating in the relationship between writer and reader the kind of lies, bad faith, and miscommunication she is describing between parents and child—though this paradoxically creates such an extreme consciousness of style that manipulation becomes a subject of a different sort.

The use of the second speaker, the way "characters" shift and mutate, the need for connection also place this book in a formal context that recreates the flow and tone typical of most of her work, with its constant internal revisions and extenuations, its ceaseless editing of consciousness. Recreates quite directly indeed: it's easy to find, and then be overwhelmed by, the links between what is presented in this factual and "accessible" work, and everything else, however fictive and difficult, Sarraute has written.

Childhood is almost shockingly connected, as if after years of gazing at a tree, you saw its roots, its seed, as if you were suddenly granted X-ray eyes. Some of these connections are banal, almost amusing: Nathalie began without suspicion of her parents; she learned better; Sarraute's collected literary essays are The Age of Suspicion. Nathalie had "her ideas"; It Is There is a play entirely about the intellectual and emotional havoc caused among some male intellectuals by a woman with "ideas." (pp. 42-3)

Large chunks of Sarraute's later subject matter can thus be traced to the most quotidian moments of her recollection, and so, on top of its other achievements, Childhood has gracefully, almost surreptitiously, made a hundred dissertations redundant….

Yet this book is extremely different from Sarraute's others and not because—precisely not because—it is about herself. Indeed, writing about her self, and her small, long-gone childhood world, has expanded her horizons. In Childhood, the malice and claustrophobia of her novels disappear. Sarraute has seized on a reality which can withstand her scrutiny of language and character.

Childhood is not more realistic because it is, as its publishers keep urging, "accessible" in the sense of easy to read. It is no less "difficult" than Tropisms or The Use of Speech or, granted you know the milieu, The Golden Fruits. While Childhood's sharply imagistic scenes and rather clear divisions between one speaker and the other make it, page by page, far from the "existential puzzle" of "Fools Say", and the kind of people who inhabit Childhood make it much less of a chore to read than The Planetarium, it lacks those works' saving, acid humor. The broadening of her realism comes simply from the way a subject of widest meaning—the relationship of lies and power, rooted in a child's developing relationship to words and authority—is presented through a technique which can replicate this development as no ostensibly "naturalistic" style could….

Sarraute in The Age of Suspicion described with contempt those modern writers who make their characters commit "unwonted, monstrous acts" which the reader, who has committed no such acts, "quietly thrusts aside … without the heavy shadow that submerges his own dark places having lifted for a second." Her scrupulous book lifts that shadow, and while what's bared is of all things a bourgeois family, that family's deceptions, affections, and most fleeting transitions have correspondences for most of us, and are the starting point as well as the mirror of our society as well as hers. (p. 43)