Sarraute has survived. Among other things, she has survived becoming outmoded, ever since the absolute, irremediable, and final obliteration of the nouveau roman (a phenomenon of the '50s and '60s to which her name, as to a bit of overused flypaper, remains rather irritatingly stuck) from the agenda of fashionable French literary life. No matter: Sarraute was writing before the "new novel" had its name, and these memoirs were among the largish successes of last year's French publishing season. (p. 1)

Yet Sarraute has survived to bring her method to bear on her own past. What united the new novelists was a common trick: They embedded strictly real (that is, possible) events in an irreal and strictly subjective time. To be sure, each worked differently. Robbe-Grillet is all eyes, addicted to a seen continuous present. Sarraute is a listener, and her aim is not the voyeur's ecstasy but satire. She has kept her water glass pressed, always, against the paper-thin wall of life's small talk. ("Small talk": I know of no French expression equivalent to this delicious phrase, but it might have been invented for Nathalie Sarraute.) Listening to small talk, she strains to catch the false notes of inauthenticity. She is forever listening for the lie, the revelatory catch and quaver of falsehood. That giveaway tremor is her truth.

So it is in Childhood. Once again, Sarraute is gathering evidence…. Her childhood was unhappy, and the little girl had every reason to learn to listen for the lie…. The little cosmopolite—a mixture of French, Russian, and Jewish heritage—was torn between an increasingly indifferent mother in Russia and a cold but constant father in Paris…. Retrieving the small talk of these large betrayals, Sarraute repeatedly moved me with her lawyer-like precision, finding the locus of a little girl's double-binds….

No accident that the grown-up Sarraute came to call one of her books The Age of Suspicion. Her art of mistrust had been earned. Childhood is composed in two voices. The first is that of a sensuous, energetic, wistful, remembering, slightly (but only slightly) sentimental self. This is what remains of the child's voice. The other—commenting—voice is a none-too-generous, punitive, intelligent, superegotistical, irritable "adult" counter-voice. It seems reluctant to permit Sarraute to write at all.

Though informed by truth and an uncompromising intelligence, Childhood does not seem to me destined for a place among the best memoirs of childhood in modern literature…. It is too thin, too reticent, and its anger is too unresolved. Too much that is too important is not said. Show, don't tell: Here the tiresome, exhausted modernist bromide reaches a kind of reductio. Sarraute's method, based in reticence, resists the idea, I know. But I cannot help believing that Sarraute should be telling more, much, much more, about her betrayals. We are shown the manipulations of 70-some years ago. But what the manipulated child has to tell the adult, and vice versa, is the whole interest of the memoir as a form. Sarraute understands this, she makes it central to her book. Unfortunately the adult intelligence here is neither compassionate nor supple. It is irritable, reprimanding, snobbish. "The past is not dead," Faulkner wrote. "It is not even past." Every memoirist tests the power of this absorbing half-truth. Listening for her childhood's lies, the artist of suspicion has come up with an old; and very familiar one—that parental love can be trusted. I knew it, she seems to say, I always knew it. But then she lifts the angry stepmotherly forefinger of her mistrust, and will not let it speak. (p. 14)