By the time he was elected to the Académie française in 2004, Alain Robbe-Grillet had suffered a cruel fate: He had all the renown he could have hoped for but few readers to show for it. The literary movement he’d launched half a century earlier—the nouveau roman—had ground to a halt. The new novel— anti-psychological and anti-expressive, stripped of individualised characters, temporal continuity and meaning itself—was no longer new.
