Books: Difficulties & Ecstasy

IMPOSSIBLE OBJECT by Nicholas Mosley. 219 pages. Coward-McCann. $4.95.

Cinema's nouvelle vague has washed over fiction, leaving on the beach a number of books that are full of non sequiturs and characters who are used as themes rather than as people. Above all, under the influence of Resnais and Godard, time and reality are cast adrift.

Nicholas Mosley, whose work has been adapted for films by Harold Pinter, is a case in point. His novels (Accident, Assassins) are explicitly cinematic. In Impossible Object, he begins with the appropriately open-ended notion that "society used to provide...

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