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Taken as social comedy, The Golden Fruits is a marvelous hoax, an inside joke, which sums up and lampoons every possible critical position—from the visceral to the cerebral—so thoroughly that for a season or two, cocktail-party critics may find their tongues cleaving to the roofs of their mouths. It is also a killing parable about intellectual conformity. Most impressively, however, the book transforms a dry, decorous and essentially frivolous scene into a simmering sideshow in which a series of tiny figures, full of recognizably human venom and vulnerability, grapple cruelly with each other.
Psychiatric Seismographs. Like many another experimental French novelist today, Nathalie Sarraute is trying to break away both from stereotyped Victorian emotions like honor, love and greed and from the equally crude Freudian categories of guilt and sexuality. Unlike the others, however, she has not retreated into eye-catching but sterile gimmickry—writing only about things and objective surfaces, for example, or offering as a novel a box of unnumbered pages. Instead, she has returned to the world of minute inner impulses, best explored in the past by Dostoevsky. Too delicate to be recorded on the rough seismographs of the psychoanalysts and only vaguely understood by the subjects themselves, these tremors yet betray the existence of some hidden volcanic life, which each man secretly knows to be his own.