The man who ruined the novel

Thu, 06 Mar 2008 12:03:00 +0000

I should have felt grief at the news of Alain Robbe-Grillet's death last week. Instead I recognized in myself only confusing relief. He was a great champion for the innovative novel, so in a way I owe him: I'm a novelist, and while I would be loath to call myself avant-garde, my first book did have marginalia all the way through and my second was a literary anthology of an invented country. But the truth is, Robbe-Grillet was a disaster for innovative novels. After him, literary innovation, experiment with form or anything mildly unconventional came to be seen as pretentious and dry, the proper domain of the cheese-eating surrender monkeys and nobody else.

He was probably the most famous novelist in history who never wrote a famous novel, which may be why his obituary writers barely mentioned his fiction. Appropriately, his most celebrated work, the film "Last Year at Marienbad," was inspired by somebody else's novel, Argentine writer Adolpho Bioy Casares' "The Invention of Morel" -- in South America, postwar fiction combined innovation with pleasure in ways that escaped Europe and America.

Salon.com > Stephen Marche

The man who ruined the novel