[Below, Connell finds the novellas of The Woman Destroyed highly credible, purporting that they should not be read as fiction but rather as "extensions of the author."]

Two long stories and a short novel on the menace of middle age. The only unsatisfactory thing about them is that they are not fiction. Simone de Beauvoir writes with perception, grace and intelligence on the subject of aging women very much as she wrote about all women in The Second Sex. She belongs to that estimable line of classically articulate Europeans; she is a pleasure to read, and for anyone who happens to be interested in women she is instructive. But the heroines breathe collectively, not individually. They are amorphous. They are extensions of Mme. de Beauvoir rather than themselves. Once this is accepted, there is not much to quibble about.

The least of the three must be The Monologue. The time is New Year's Eve; a woman of 43 is alone in her apartment listening to the noise of a party and to the gaiety in the street. A Joycean soliloquy informs us of her past and present—of Dédé, Tristan, Marietta, and others, none of whom is substantial. The one surprising thing about this story is the punctuation. Perhaps afraid of confounding readers who have difficulty with Joyce, Mme. de Beauvoir has not gone whole hog; instead, the stream bubbles along along along but suddenly bumps against a period, or a colon.

Except for this capricious rhythm, The Monologue reads well enough, though it is not deeply felt. It seems to be an exercise. She may have decided to write it because of the sentence from Flaubert with which she prefaces this story: "The monologue is her form of revenge."

In The Age of Discretion a neurotic wife is alienating her husband and their son. The story communicates a sense of urgency; you feel that the author wanted desperately to describe this. It might be more memorable if the wife were not an author, because this pulls us back to Mme. de Beauvoir: "That day the first criticism of my book appeared. Lantier accused me of going over the same ground again. Not one had grasped the originality of my work." And there are references to Valéry, Saint-Beuve, Rousseau, Chateaubriand, Montesquieu and others, which are, of course, appropriate to such a character, but still it does become a bit incestuous.

Despite this, The Age of Discretion is good. The anguish, the resentment, the malice, the aging: "I have known moments that had the pure blaze of a diamond. But they have always come without being called for. They used to spring up unexpectedly, an unlooked-for truce, an unhoped-for promise, cutting across the activities that insisted upon my presence; I would enjoy them almost illicitly, coming out of the lycée, or the exit of a metro, or on my balcony between two sessions of work, or hurrying along the boulevard to meet André. Now I walked about Paris, free, receptive, and frigidly indifferent."

The Woman Destroyed is a short novel in diary form. After the first few entries we have learned the principal names, the locale, the season, the situation, various conditions, affinities and antipathies. The hand of the craftsman is here, firmly efficient. Characters are encapsulated for easy ingestion: "Colette needed security above all, and Lucienne needed freedom: I understand them both. And I think each perfectly successful in her own way—Colette so sensitive and kind, Lucienne so brilliant, so full of energy."

Like a lady's coiffure, every aspect of the novel has been considered and imaginatively arranged. Maybe the descriptive word ought to be "accomplished." The novel is sensitively accomplished. Just as in the stories, we realize that we are being told whatever is germane, nothing that is not. Then why should it be difficult to tell Maurice from André from Philippe from Tristan from Quillan? Why is it impossible to recall the differences among Mariette, Martine, Lucienne, Colette, Noëllie, Dédé and Sylvie?

Anyway, Maurice has an affair with Noëllie so the betrayed wife attempts an affair with Quillan. Here, again, we have characters who are Literary. Maurice is a physician, a specialist of some sort who does research, yet even he writes "popular articles." Well, it does happen.

Indeed, everything that happens in all three stories is credible, which is an achievement. What is significant is what is missing—the violent touch of life that distinguishes high art from craftsmanship.