Essentially Mme. Sarraute seeks out the first tender shoots of our mental life—more evolved than the undifferentiated static that fluctuates during every living moment, but not yet so conscious that it gets caught and stifled in the rough net of conventional language. As a result, all her novels alternate between clumsy pregnant silences and the impasse of freeze-dried clichés.

This alternation also characterizes the mood and style of "Childhood" and shapes its vignettes. Time after time a section hinges on a commonplace expression that crashes into a young girl's consciousness and becomes the burden of her existence….

Several sections begin with such an arresting expression and patiently try to worm their way around the verbal-mental block it created in the child. Others open in an intermediate realm of the child's floating perceptions and suddenly come aground on the shoal of unfeeling words thoughtlessly uttered by adults. Sometimes these scenes carry a wistfully comic flavor, or at least a glimpse of precocious gallows humor. Mme. Sarraute's consistent and sensitive attitude toward language lends a strong unity to her work and approaches that of a troubled poet like Rilke or Mallarmé—speech as both essential and unbearable.

The comic in these unassuming memories almost disappears behind the gradual crescendo of sorrow and self-protection. Nathalie Sarraute's earliest memories of herself as Natasha Tcherniak concerned her awkward, often painful shuttlings between the domiciles of her Russian parents, divorced soon after her birth and both remarried….

From an early age Natasha has been aware of the inappropriate singularity of what she calls "my ideas"—tremors that grow from a low muttering in her mind into uncontrollable eruptions of word or deed…. An infantile form of the demonic seems to drive her, like a character out of Dostoyevsky. But Natasha tries hard to master her demon and sometimes believes she has succeeded. "Childhood" can be read as the story of the formation of a will, though I cannot recall the word being mentioned.

Next to the sorrows of separation and the vagaries of a young will, the third and late-arriving element in these memories is Natasha's shift from racial innocence as a good little French child like all others in school to an awareness of her Slavic Jewish ancestry. It comes as a quiet revelation, not as an immediate social problem, after she goes to mass with her governess and then listens to her free-thinking father….

The low-keyed form of "Childhood" affords it the double quality of directness and reflectiveness. Mme. Sarraute accepts without distress the fragmentary nature of her memories. She has probably made some adjustments; any probe disturbs the circumstances being probed. Events follow a loosely chronological order with enough cross-references to keep us alert. These short sections move at an almost respiratory pace that may be in part attributable to the steady weaving of the verb tenses between present and past. That oscillation springs directly from another feature of the form.

By an evidently careful decision, Mme. Sarraute has created for herself and out of herself in "Childhood" an interlocutor, an alter ego who addresses her as tu, questions her motives and her credibility, supplies alternative explanations and goads her to undertake the project. The opening pages present a playful dialogue between one voice for Natasha-Nathalie, child protagonist grafted onto adult narrator, and another voice for the interlocutor-author who doubts and coaxes and also tends to push her literary effects too hard….

It sounds like a gentle mocking of her own novels. We are in good hands, a long way from the spectacular intellectual surfing of Sartre's autobiography, "Words," traversing large expanses of time organized by le passé simple, and also a long way from the poised, self-deprecation of "Barthes on Barthes," another contemporary French autobiography.

I have not yet put my finger on the particular quality I find in "Childhood." In Antonioni's film "Blow-Up" the photographer enlarges his cryptic pictures in order to discover clues in the shrubbery. But blown up beyond a critical point of graininess, the photographs no longer yield any visual content that can be assembled and recognized as reality. This paradox of magnification relates to the writer's dilemma. The scale on which "Childhood" is written brings the reader miraculously close to the texture of life the way a child, precariously balanced between two parents, two countries, might experience it. But when you approach so close, language no longer serves adequately to record the observations; it seems to obliterate the very thing it is meant to designate. Still tiny, sitting on a park bench between her father and an alluring young woman of uncertain status, Natasha Tcherniak has just heard a tale from Hans Christian Andersen. Nathalie Sarraute, remembering the moment and operating inside the same "I" as the child Natasha, cannot accept the terms "happiness" or "ecstasy" to describe Natasha's feelings, not even the simple word "joy." Such words "cannot gather up what fills me, brims over in me, disperses, dissolves, melts into the pink bricks, the blossom-covered espaliers, the lawn, the pink and white petals, the air vibrating with barely perceptible tremors, with waves … waves of life, quite simply of life, what other word?… I am inside them with nothing else, nothing that does not belong to them, nothing that belongs to me."

The passage, like all of "Childhood," records a prolonged probing toward language whose full realization would bring everything to a standstill. Some say the French novel will never recover its greatness without finding great subjects. Nathalie Sarraute says in her quiet voice that a form of greatness lurks in remote twinges, in interior moments where we rarely look for it. (p. 31)