Morale élémentaire, while it holds few surprises for the reader familiar with Raymond Queneau's earlier writings, represents nonetheless an important and fascinating achievement. Surrealist, poet, mathematician, novelist, humorist, linguistic explorer, Queneau is most of these again in his latest book. It has three parts, a sequence of fifty-one identically constructed verse poems and two groups of prose poems, a series of sixteen texts followed by a series of sixty-four. With one exception (the last poem in part two), no text takes up more than a page. The prose texts blend the narrative with the descriptive mode in such a way as to keep the "moral" just beyond our grasp, and all are graced with Queneau's characteristic wit.

The verse texts, a stunning tour de force, give us Queneau the student of linguistic production and the inventor of poetic forms at his best. Every text has precisely the same structure and appearance and can be read either from left to right, line by line from top to bottom (i.e., according to the usual procedure for reading a poem), or from top to bottom within each of the three columns that appear on the page. Each poem is fifteen lines long. Except for a part of the middle column (always the same part) which reads like a seven-line poem, the columns comprise only two words per line, a noun and its modifier. Each phrase so formed seems a variant of another such phrase in the text; a semantic element in one phrase appears to derive from or to engender another phrase by tautology, antithesis or metonymy. The miniature "poem" inserted in the middle column is as rudimentary in its way as are the noun-modifier phrases that literally surround it.

It is obvious that we are once again dealing with a kind of exercises de style, but this time everything is on a more elemental level, with the author more concerned with the production of writing itself than with narrative voice variations and thus more concerned than ever before, perhaps, with every writer's morale élémentaire. (p. 833)