[L'Usage de la parole] is a delectably austere, beady-eyed book, short and with no word roman or récits on the cover to say that it is fiction. Roman it is not, récits hardly; but fiction yes, and, as always with Mme. Sarraute, of the rarest, most moral kind. There are ten brief sections, each with its own epigraph of some commonplace phrase or group of words.

The first of these is in German, "Ich sterbe", the German for "I am dying" and the last words spoken by Chekhov on his deathbed at Badenweiler, the spa to which he had despairingly gone for the sake of his health. They have the pathos of all recorded last words, but made keener by the fact that for Chekhov they were a literal alienation of his thoughts, since he spoke them in German not his native Russian. From this Sarraute argues, touchingly, to the dramatist's heroic modesty in extremis, but it is rather the harrowing discrepancy between the bare form of words—as if he were setting out to conjugate a verb not easily used in the first person singular—and the foreknowledge they contain of his own approaching extinction, which gives Chekhov's historical "Ich sterbe" its rightful precedence in L'Usage de la parole. It is a sombre, humane opening to what is elsewhere a mordant and unforgiving book.

The phrases which give rise to the remaining nine scenes or episodes are French ones: "A très bientôt", "Et pourquoi pas?", "Ton père. Ta soeur", and so on, ordinary enough until Sarraute imagines for them a context which turns them from bland civilities into weapons of psychological warfare. Friends meet and converse, in a café or in the street, and are all sociability; except underneath, where the best of friends can at moments be the most savage of opponents, Sarraute resorts sardonically to metaphor to indicate what words will not capture: the shameful and ineffable animosities that constantly imperil our urbanity.

This is a party-game for grownups; to allow the imagination to play around the vacuous and paltry remarks which daily meet the ear. It is a game which Sarraute invites her readers, ironically, to play with her; for the otherwise random scenes of L'Usage de la parole are unified by the artful commentary of a narrator, asking for our trust and forbearance as each scene opens, and ultimately for our cooperation, since the scenes are meant as specimens, as object-lessons in the interpretation of human motives. Sarraute's are micro-dramas of evasiveness and anxious conformism, of our will to live by the prevailing rules and also to see our friends as consoling alter egos. Each variation on what is really the one scene records a profound, disorienting intrusion by one person on another, a violation of the superficialities we live by. The two speakers have roles, never names, because the fateful anonymity of language is both a refuge and a curse, it makes conversation at once easier and less authentic.

Sarraute has no equal at imagining the form of these secret contests.