118
PARTISAN REVIEW
to worry about the
sale
of a Sagan, regardless of its worth. But it
is
apparent that this third novel,
Dans un mois, dans un an
(published
in English as
Those Without Shadows),
has none of the qualities of the
first two, however much it may resemble them in its defects.
The story concerns a dozen people more or less- all strictly middle–
class and most of them very rich- who naturally are bored and are
trying to find an escape from their boredom by the usual mean!-love,
ambition, literary career. As a subject, it is no worse than any other;
for that matter, is there such a thing as a
bad
subject in fiction? But
Franc;oise Sagan has run into several obstacles, and is not able to
hurdle any of them.
First there is the matter of style. Until now, she had always written
a rather poetic prose, even though it may have struck one as being fairly
facile. But it is possible to write poetically about bourgeois youth on
one condition, and one only: that you yourself are one of them and that
you stick to yourself as a subject. For there are endless poetic possibilities
in writing about oneself. The moment that Franc;oise Sagan decided not
to write about herself any more, but rather about those people who
always have a hundred thousand francs in their hand- the hand that
isn't holding the cocktail-all poetry vanished. What remained was
a desert. Instantly, we are struck with the banalities, the signs of inept–
ness, all of which have been there from the start but had been over–
looked in our admiration for the writer's grace. Take a sentence like
this one, which we find it hard to forgive: "The basement cabaret
where she had danced in her student days had become a tourist hide–
out."
It
is almost a
tour de force
to assemble so many cliches in so
small a space, and still say so little. Unfortunately, it is a
tour de force
that one finds on every page, almost in every line.
Having arrived at this decision- not to write about herself-Fran–
c;oise Sagan must have become aware almost at once that it was not
~oing
to be easy. For she must write about someone, and it would have
to be about other people. She would then be obliged to create character
-and here again she came to grief. Indeed, in order to write about
people who do nothing, think nothing and bear no particular distinguish–
ing mark, one has to be an observer-an angry one or a well-disposed
one, but an observer. But one constantly has the feeling that Franc;oise
Sagan is incapable of judging the people she talks about, for the reason
that they are the very people she has lived among since the day she
was born, whom she has seen every day of her life, and still does. Being
unable to make her characters act in any significant way-to her every–
thing they do is commonplace because their behavior is part and parcel
