When Alain Robbe-Grillet argued for the New Novel, a construction that I imagine was intended to save the novel like throwing items overboard to save a sinking ship, he wrote that “the systematic repetition of past forms is not only absurd and futile, but can even become harmful.” The New Novel, as he described it in his book Pour un nouveau roman (1963), published in English as For a New Novel, was to be a search for forms capable of expressing new relations between people and the world. He expressly refused to define it as a school with a common set of instructions. Other writers like Nathalie Sarraute, Michel Butor and Claude Simon also questioned those conventions, with very different results. Sarraute wrote that “today’s reader is suspicious of what the author’s imagination has to offer him,” in the essay collected in L’Ère du soupçon (1956), or The Age...

When Alain Robbe-Grillet argued for the New Novel, a construction that I imagine was intended to save the novel like throwing items overboard to save a sinking ship, he wrote that “the systematic repetition of past forms is not only absurd and futile, but can even become harmful.” The New Novel, as he described it in his book Pour un nouveau roman (1963), published in English as For a New Novel, was to be a search for forms capable of expressing new relations between people and the world. He expressly refused to define it as a school with a common set of instructions. Other writers like Nathalie Sarraute, Michel Butor and Claude Simon also questioned those conventions, with very different results. Sarraute wrote that “today’s reader is suspicious of what the author’s imagination has to offer him,” in the essay collected in L’Ère du soupçon (1956), or The Age of Suspicion. The reader’s distrust of the novelist’s procedures was already a subject long before the internet.

Marie Redonnet emerged a generation later at Minuit, Robbe-Grillet’s publisher, sharing the ambition to reconsider what a novel could be. In a 2010 interview with Words Without Borders, the critic Warren Motte connected Redonnet’s generation to the New Novel through their publisher, Minuit, and their determination to renew the form. Indeed, her early books are thin, light-weight, with easily digestible titles—Hôtel Splendid, Forever Valley, Rose Mellie Rose—and short, declarative sentences. More than that, the way they are written is somewhat like when, in a foreign language lesson, you are given a string of unconnected facts and asked to string them together with that language’s rendition of “because,” “therefore,” “due to the fact that”: explanatory connectors that Redonnet often leaves out.

Whether Redonnet represents a format for the novel that could bring it back to its place in ordinary daily life remains to be seen, even as her first novel is now forty years old. Its light-weight boldness nevertheless serves as a drastic transition that must lead us somewhere. At least for me, the shortness makes it possible to begin, and the writing makes it possible to continue. Although the New Novel was not a prescription for short books, Redonnet’s particular economy, what she calls poverty, is what interests me.

In 1986, when Redonnet published Splendid Hôtel with Les Éditions de Minuit, she had already published the poetry collection Le Mort & compagnie with P.O.L the previous year. Her first novel occupied 128 pages in its original French edition; Jordan Stump’s English translation, Hôtel Splendid, appeared in 1994. It recounts the daily life of an unnamed woman who has inherited her grandmother’s hotel, built beside a swamp and over an underground lake, alongside a cemetery which frequently floods. The protagonist lives with her two sisters, the sickly Ada and the unsuccessful actress Adel, and does the work of maintaining an establishment that continually defeats her. The toilets block, the wallpaper peels, insects and rats arrive, and the building requires repairs that she can scarcely keep up with. Railway workers become guests as a line is constructed across the swamp. The repeated tasks provide the movement of the novel. There is no need to interrupt them with a lengthy explanation of what it feels like to be responsible for a place, and for people, that consume all one’s energy. In the era in which we live, where an iPhone is readily available to provide immediate stimulation, this honest and earnest dissemination of fictional facts, their freedom from pretense or unnecessary language, has been the best way back into sustained reading I have found so far.

Recently she has returned to critical attention with Port l’Étoile, published by Le Tripode in February 2025, although her rediscovery has happened in stages. After Diego in 2005, she went more than a decade without publishing a new book. Frédéric Martin, the founder of Le Tripode, encouraged her return with La Femme au colt 45 in 2016; the publisher then collected her first three novels as Héritières in 2017. A German edition of Hotel Splendid appeared from Suhrkamp in December 2024, and an English omnibus, Hôtel Splendid Trilogy, is listed for August 2027 from New Directions, with an introduction by Missouri Williams. This is a work being put back into circulation across languages, alongside an author still producing new fiction.

Renewed interest brings the vocabulary of minimalism with it, but that description is hardly new: Warren Motte included Redonnet in Small Worlds: Minimalism in Contemporary French Literature in 1999. Reviewing Port l’Étoile in En attendant Nadeau in April 2025, Sébastien Omont described how her brief, assertive sentences register lives repeatedly interrupted and resumed. The idea that we are living through a minimalization of culture, and that some maximalist phase will shortly reinject interest into our post-avant-garde world, is tempting. Jenny Offill, speaking to the Los Angeles Times in April 2026, anticipated a return someday toward longer, more expansive novels. But that remains a prediction about literature, and I would hesitate to turn it into a law of culture. Redonnet’s economy was already established in the 1980s. Its usefulness to a distracted reader today does not explain why she invented it.

Hôtel Splendid shares its title from the hotel in Rimbaud’s “Après le Déluge,” in Illuminations, a passage Redonnet uses as an epigraph. There is a complication worth keeping: according to the scholar Jeannette Gaudet, Redonnet recognized the connection only after writing the novel. Rimbaud’s hotel is built “dans le chaos de glaces et de nuit du pôle”—in the chaos of ice and polar night. Redonnet’s hotel likewise seems an unreasonable place to construct something meant to last. The book achieves, for me, a kind of meta-function of a novel, where the reading of the novel itself brings a recovery of the desire to read, without putting too much stress on a reader who has become unaccustomed to books and ashamed of the difficulty. Its sentences are easy to enter. Their repetition is a bit like raindrops hitting your face. The ordinary vocabulary gives us access to an experience that is built more like a sculpture or a painting than the novels we’re used to reading, and the small number of pages makes it possible to try it out.

Today books seem to denote patience, education and a capacity for sustained thought, qualities that become uncomfortable to advertise when one can scarcely finish the thing. The reading of a book can seem counter to the immediate, slick responsiveness of a computerized world in which a thought can be handed to ChatGPT and returned, mirrored and elaborated, in seconds. Redonnet had already described wanting literature to resist “a culture of the all-powerful image, which threatens to kill literature,” in an interview later excerpted by the novelist Eugene Lim. Her short sentences leave the reader something to do: connect, imagine, remember, reconsider. One must consider in all of this that novels in our era need to change drastically, and that length, explanation and psychological detail should have to justify themselves as choices. Redonnet gives me interesting ideas about what the future of the novel had been, is, and can become.

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