[In the following review, Littlejohn notes both the merits and flaws of the novellas in Beauvoir 's The Woman Destroyed.]

Two of the three narrative portraits that make up Simone de Beauvoir's latest book are unpleasant and unpersuasive; the third is a quite beautiful success. All three are variations on a theme of the woman of middle or later age (43, 44, 60) who suddenly finds herself thrown on her own resources (a lifetime's delusions, the defensive fictions of pride), resources that turn out to be wretchedly inadequate for the job of supporting her through the desert ahead. All these women—the intellectual, the bourgeoise, the shrew—prove in the end desperately dependent on their men; their stories could serve as a kind of illustrative appendix to The Second Sex.

But the fictional case study—the confined, carefully crafted analysis-through-narrative of a single person or a single problem that the French call a récit—depends centrally on the success, the appropriateness and tact of the author's technical means. There are defects, I think, in the very imaginative conceptions behind the second and third stories in this book; but it is primarily due to simple errors of craft that they collapse and come to nothing.

The Monologue pretends to be a 32-page stream of consciousness, of the foul, neurotic consciousness of a woman, left alone on New Year's Eve (one child dead, one husband divorced, another refusing to see her): what it really is is an inept tour de force by the author. In trying to ape the sordid mental idiom of a vulgar shrew, Mme. de Beauvoir produces a clumsy, unnatural river of slang, which reeks of condescension, of a kind of self-willed literary slumming—and which, even if authentic, would be untranslatable. She tries to adopt the Joycean mode, but the "associations" are so contrived, the rhythmic and psychological impulses so forced, that the resultant shrill voice sounds more like Bette Davis than Molly Bloom. And, since one of the games of the récit is to have your first person narrator reveal himself unconsciously, this tiresome hag drops "unintentional" confessions every few lines.

In the long title story, in French La Femme Rompue("Broken" better than "Destroyed"?), one can, I think, see the beginnings, the outlines of the story Mme. de Beauvoir intended to write. Considered abstractly, it seems rich in possibility. I can only guess that a grievous decline of creative energy kept her from bringing it off. A secondary plot is introduced, then abandoned; a great number of motifs and situations are duplicated from the first, successful story in this book. The banality of the style, the dulling, predictable progress of the affair, the woman's magazine mix of scandal and sentimentality—these may all be explained by the fact that the story's vehicle is the diary of a woman relatively banal, dull, and sentimental. Explained, but not excused: for this is a story before it is a diary, and the tactful craftsman can illuminate sentimentality and endow the banal with his own double vision.

These stories, in their bitterness, depression and failure, do perhaps represent one side of Simone de Beauvoir at 60. But she does her best self more justice in The Age of Discretion, the wise and tender testament of a woman very like herself.

Her success here, like her unsuccess elsewhere, is very much a matter of narrative voice. The speaker is a leading French intellectual of 60 (retired lycée professor and Sorbonne lecturer, author of literary studies), the possessor of a splendid mind, acute sensibility, high moral principal, and a social conscience only slightly less active than that of her husband, a distinguished savant as old and as famous as she.

The autobiographical source is clear: but the real challenge Mme. de Beauvoir set for herself here (the source of the narrative's tension and attraction) was to endow her heroine with all of her own lucidity, her clarity of self-perception: and still to show her vulnerable, dependent and mean. For this is, finally, one more story of self-delusion, self-revealed.

The formula, the "plot," involves only a very few elements—maternal possessiveness, intellectual pride, resistance to aging, the devious ability of the human heart to mask revenge in high principle. But they are so intricately balanced I would only falsify the scheme by attempting to describe it. Suffice it to say that the woman is, at the last, stripped of her specious reasonings, and forced to face the dawn of a drier, colder, greater lucidity: but not alone.

The limitations of the story are those, perhaps, natural to the récit: a certain skeletal reductiveness (no past, no roots, no others, no loose ends), a certain dryness of air and spareness of furniture, an excessive neatness of structure. But The Age of Discretion proves this austere, classical form can still be made to say a great deal.