The association of Nathalie Sarraute (1900–99) with the nouveau roman is inescapable. With Tropisme (1939), she began writing twenty years before that literary movement erupted in 1950s France. Younger writers such as Michel Butor (1926–2016) and Alain Robbe-Grillet (1922–2008) caught up with her, although she resisted any notion of being part of a literary grouping or school. She always wanted the stage to herself and would not perform her work except in solo. The author of many radio and stage plays, she was indeed a superb performer.
To put it baldly, the nouveau roman dispenses with plots, characters, and even the kind of psychology that has become so customary in the modern novel. What is left, then? What Sarraute called, as in the above-mentioned title, “tropisms,” borrowing the biological term for movements of organisms in response to external stimuli. You are what you experience, but don’t think for a moment that this means you can give it a name or a character. Reality is too fleeting, our tropisms too varied to be codified in the plots and characters of traditional novels. Or so Sarraute argued in The Age of Suspicion (1963) and exemplified in novels such as Portrait of an Unknown Man (1958) and The Planetarium (1959).
If novel-writing needs to be divested of plot and character to be replaced by unidentified voices, imagine what Sarraute thought of biography. Ann Jefferson tells us, drawing directly on her subject’s own words: “I always say that I don’t have
