"An originator of the Nouveau Roman, or New Novel, and the screenwriter for Alain Resnais's 1961 cult film "Last Year at Marienbad," Robbe-Grillet was the very model of a postwar avant-gardist."

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Robbe-Grillet and the other so-called New Novelists, including Michel Butor, Nathalie Sarraute and Claude Simon, wanted to do in literature what others had done in art ­ just as Marcel Duchamp had deconstructed human motion in "Nude Descending a Staircase" and the Abstract Expressionists had valorized gesture, the movement of a brush stroke itself, over representation. Robbe-Grillet believed that writing should reveal the archaeology of its own construction, should depict a mind unfolding its thoughts over time.