YOU DON'T LOVE YOURSELF; by Nathalie Sarraute; translated by Barbara Wright; George Braziller; 233 pages; $17.95.
Nathalie Sarraute is one of the group of French writers including Alain Robbe-Grillet, Michel Butor, Robert Pinget and Marguerite Duras whose names are associated with the "nouveau roman" that first gained fame - or notoriety - in the late 1950s.The idea behind the "new novel" was to dispense with traditional devices such as narrator, narrative, characters and plot in order to be able to concentrate on aspects of consciousness and experience too subtle, subjective or otherwise obscure to have received close attention in more conventional novels.
Often, passages of a "nouveau roman" sound like someone thinking aloud. The question, in the absence of a conventional storyline and characters, is how well does a given "nouveau roman" engage and hold our attention? The answer, in the case of Nathalie Sarraute's latest novel, "You Don't Love Yourself," is very well indeed.
Although it is the ninth novel by a woman just entering her 90s, "You Don't Love Yourself" may serve as well as any other as a way into her work. Perhaps the simplest way of describing this novel is to say that it consists of an ongoing conversation that someone is having with himself. You could call it an interior monologue - except that it is more like a dialogue in which this unnamed person ponders the ramifications of an accusation someone has just flung at him:
" `You don't love yourself.' But what does that mean? How is that possible? You don't love yourself? Who doesn't love whom?
"You of course . . . you, the only one they are talking to.
"Me? Only me? Not all the rest of you who are me? . . . and there are so many of us . . . `a complex personality' . . . like every other. . . . Who is supposed to love whom, then, in all this?"
By the time this non-story draws to its close, the reader will have thought a lot about the roles we all play, the faces that we present to ourselves and others, the conflict between happiness and self-consciousness, and the nature of love.