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Today, at 80, retired from writing fiction, Simenon lives in a Swiss retreat with one of his former household maids. Popular fancy has tended to see him as the model for the benign, pipe-smoking Maigret, but Bresler maintains that the only connection is wish fulfillment. Maigret, with his equanimity, his intuitive sympathy for others, his fidelity to one woman, is the man that Simenon never could be. Less plausibly, Bresler attributes Simenon's "stunted sexuality" to his rejection by, and rebellion against, the formidably dour widowed mother he left behind in Liège. (When Simenon was 62, she defiantly returned all the money he had sent her for 40 years.) This purports to explain both too much and too little. As for how Simenon was able to write as he did, what demons drove him, why he held to such a reductive view of life, these remain, as Bresler bills them in the first place, a mystery.
— By Christopher Porterfield