Jealousy

Alain Robbe-Grillet

Alain Robbe-Grillet's first two novels, The Erasers and Voyeur, were the best thing to happen to French literature since Apollinaire. Then came Jealousy. It would seem that a suspected love affair between a man's wife and their neighbor would be the perfect subject for an author who obsessively details scenes, going back over them to change small details and keep the reader off his feet, wouldn't it?

Sadly, in practice, it didn't work that way at all. We are given a nameless narrator, his wife A..., and the neighbor, Franck, and the unnamed narrator's obsessive going over of a few particular incidents (the implication is that one of them is presently happening, while the others are things he's going over in his head). There are also a lot of extraneous details about banana trees that were ridiculed in the French press upon the book's first publication.

What made The Erasers and Voyeur different from Jealousy is that they had plots, if odd, meandering ones that didn't really go anywhere. Jealousy is a hundred forty-page set piece, in which nothing happens and to which there is no resolution. Readers of Robbe-Grillet's previous works will not be surprised at the latter, but the former might come as something of a shock. As a short story, or perhaps a novella, Jealousy could have been a chilling, creepily effective little piece on the mind degenerating over obsession; as it stands, it's rather, well, boring.