When I was a lad and had not yet learned to beware the faux amis lying in wait for me in the playground of the French language, I imagined that the term la nouvelle vague meant not “the new wave” but something like “the new vagueness.” La nouvelle vague was the term used for the new young cin?tes, Truffaut, Resnais, Godard, and the rest, but in my mind, presumably because of the faux-homophony between nouvelle and novel, it came to apply also to practitioners of the nouveau roman such as Alain Robbe-Grillet, Philippe Sollers, and Nathalie Sarraute, those bright but distant stars in my slowly expanding literary firmament. “The new vagueness” seemed to me to describe very well the work of these writers, with its wilfully jaded dynamics, its studied aversion to specifics, its degree-zero style.

I acquired an image of the quintessential postmodern European novel. There would be a faceless anti-hero, trudging the avenues and squalid back alleys of a nameless city, following some mysteriously ordained quest which he knows he can neither complete nor abandon, and which is, anyway, merely a metaphor for the real task in which he is engaged-the search for an identity. Even the pages of this ur-roman would have a characteristic look: high and narrow and somehow tottery, with squeezed margins, few paragraph breaks, and no passages of dialogue where in more conventional tales the weary reader could pause to paddle in the shallows.

All very earnest, all very enigmatic, and all maddeningly vague. This kind of novel is still being written in mainland Europe. Every year it wins one of those little-known but highly lucrative literary prizes offered by this or that foundation with affiliations to the EU. Some of these novels even deserve a prize. Some of them are even read, or at least bought, by surprisingly large numbers of people. But it is all a far, far cry from the glory days of the European novel, when a new work by Thomas Mann or Alberto Moravia or G?ter Grass would set the Sunday supplements humming with excitement.

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