Although Nathalie Sarraute may have been a precursor of the New Novel in many of its aims and methods, she has always held herself aloof from identification with any literary movement or school. She refuses the application of any labels to her work, just as she rejects all delimiting classifications….

When Robbe-Grillet asked her, in 1972, if she belonged to the group of writers (loosely comprised of himself, Pinget, Ricardou, and Simon) who were then being designated as exponents of a "New New Novel," she firmly disclaimed her adherence. Most of these novelists, she pointed out, had experienced an abrupt rupture in their work about 1960, after which their fiction assumed a new orientation; instead of continuing to "represent" the world, either subjectively or objectively, they tended now to concentrate on questions of language and textuality per se, with a consequent subversion of literary and social structures. In her own case, she acknowledges no rupture of this kind…. (p. 169)

Even at an early period in her writing, Sarraute recognized a distinction between her own position and the tendency of other New Novelists, particularly with respect to objective description. The New Novelists are acutely attuned to the presence of physical objects, endlessly catalogued and recorded in their minute manifestations. While Robbe-Grillet may depict in microscopic detail the movements of a fly on a ceiling (in Jealousy) or the flotsam clinging to the bow of a ferryboat (in The Voyeur), Sarraute keeps external description to a minimum. Where she indulges in descriptive passages (more prevalent in her earlier books, like Portrait and Martereau), these are not related to the outside world, but serve to externalize the inner sensations of tropisms. Sarraute clearly distinguishes between the divergent aspects of reality that she and Robbe-Grillet present. Whereas he shows the exterior of things, objects, places, and people, she concentrates on interior movements and psychological states. His universe is static, immobile, transfixed; hers is in a process of perpetual movement and transformation. They are almost opposite in temperament and vision. (p. 170)

Sarraute has always been a loner, plying her craft on the sidelines of popularity. When her writing happened to coincide with the tendencies of her contemporaries, she was willing to accept a modicum of kinship. When her former colleagues veered off in other directions, she was satisfied to continue along the track she had outlined for herself. Because she has allowed others to assume the role of spokesmen for the New Novel and has restricted herself to discussing her own work and intentions, her pioneering position in the vanguard of modern literature has often been overlooked. The breath of vitality she has infused into the concept of fiction, the strength of her conviction in the restorative powers of the novel, have yet to be adequately acknowledged, even by those who, wittingly or unwittingly, follow the directions and recommendations she was the first to call for. (pp. 170-71)

Once having appropriated to herself the tiny domain of tropisms, Sarraute has persevered in exploring it inch by inch, in all her works, novels and plays alike. By exposing these hidden, unbidden fragments of feeling that underlie human discourse and behavior, she has isolated a timeless quality common to all human beings, of whatever background, nationality, or social stratum. The critics who accuse her of depicting a "bourgeois" milieu or a middle-class mentality have failed—like many of her own characters—to transcend appearances, to discover the kernel of eternal truth concealed beneath a semblance of momentary circumstance.

From the initial observation of tropisms as they exist and as they precondition behavior in the restricted areas of the family, Nathalie Sarraute has expanded the terrain in which tropisms flourish to include every conceivable area of human relationships. But if she were merely repeating the evidence of the earlier books in a broader field, her works would be repetitious and, eventually, stagnant. It is because she has used the medium of tropisms as a lens through which to view fundamental issues of human concern that Sarraute's work has attained a panoramic dimension. Never deviating from the very particularized tropistic response, Sarraute manages to call into question problems of both individual and universal scope. From the dilemma of "knowing" another person, she progresses to the concept of "knowledge" about literature, art, and ideas; from everyday clichés of speech, she proceeds to the totalitarian possibilities inherent in the misuse of language generally; from a concern with standards of aesthetic judgment, she advances to the broader consideration of ethical values and conduct. Her earliest novels unmasked the dangers and conflicts menacing members of the same family; her latest works hint at the far more dangerous threat that collective ignorance, fearfulness, and intolerance pose to individual members of society. It is the recapitulation of certain universal themes—their unifying resonance from book to book—that welds the self-contained entities of the individual novels and plays into a cohesive oeuvre. It is the unlimited human implications of these evanescent impulses that turn the minuscule domain of tropisms into a microcosm of the world. (pp. 171-72)