I read Les gommes when I was a student, when I pretended I understood these nouveaux romans. What are they all about? ( )

If you liked "Memento" you should read this author. Reviewed as "the new novel" because critics did not know what to make of it. This is his first and he just gets better. Recently deceased. ( )

In an odd twist of fate, Alain Robbe-Grillet died the same week that I finally finished reading his debut novel, The Erasers. I don’t ascribe any importance to that, it was just odd.

The Erasers reminds me of Black Sabbath’s Black Sabbath or The Stooges The Stooges or Metallica’s Kill ‘Em All or Public Enemy’s Yo! Bum Rush the Show. There is something great here, it isn’t perfected yet, but there is hint of something amazing to come. This grand experiment will yield a Paranoid or a Fun House or a Master of Puppets or a It Takes A Nation of Millions….

In many ways, The Erasers is the most ‘conventional’ of Robbe-Grillet’s novels if for no other reason than it was his first stab at the New Novel. On the surface, the story can even be perceived as a more intricate form of crime fiction. In a small seaside town, Daniel Dupont, a professor, becomes the ninth victim in nine days of an unknown assassin. Theories abound as to the murder’s true identity: a terrorist group unhappy with the professor’s political leanings or a long lost bastard child. Arriving in town the day after the murder is one Detective Wallas who has been sent to investigate the murder. And so it begins…

Over a 24-hour period, Robbe-Grillet has us following Wallas, wandering down blind alleys, retracing steps, replaying scenes over and over again, as he would in Jealousy and In the Labyrinth. We are introduced to the assassin, or are we? We meet many witnesses, but have they actually seen anything? Soon we are forced to ask a disturbing question: Is Wallas in fact the assassin? Is he investigating himself much like Gian Maria Volontè’s police inspector in the classic Elio Petri film, Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion.

The twisting labyrinthine plot – what would become Robbe-Grillet’s hallmark – draws you into the story, taking it to a psychological level that most crime novels (and lesser authors) are unable to achieve. You are forced to consider the possibility that Wallace has a dark side to his character that even his own brain will not reveal to the reader (something RG used even more effectively in The Voyeur). Only by ‘tailing’ Wallas do we start to see the pieces of the disjointed puzzle pulled together and ultimately the grim, inevitable outcome.

In The Erasers, Robbe-Grillet has not completely abandoned traditional use of character and plot. There is a storyline here, but it is condensed into a frenetic series of meetings, arguments, subterfuge, and yes, murders. We are left with dead ends, miscues, faulty memories, and cryptic messages that the confound the reader as much as Wallas. It is this aspect that can turn someone away; the plot is not laid out as a simple series of events and an impatient readers quickly shut down. But compared to Robbe-Grillet’s later novels, The Erasers is a great entry point to his writing, the rabbit-hole if you will.

As I said, I don’t consider The Erasers to be Robbe-Grillet’s finest work. He is a young sprite, playing with new ideas. He wouldn’t hit his stride until Jealousy and In the Labyrinth. But my god, what a hell of a debut. And still more infinitely fascinating and perfectly executed than the endless train of ‘meta-novels’ unleashed in years after by lesser writers. It stands in the shadows of Robbe-Grillet’s later work, but still exists as one of the great experiments in novel writing. And more importantly, the story is still intriguing, fascinating, and addictive. ( )