One was Camus’ L’Étranger, the other Simenon’s La veuve Couderc. Camus’ novel rose to become part of the literary firmament, and is still glittering, intensely studied, and praised—to my mind, overpraised. Simenon’s novel did not drop but settled, so to speak, went the way of the rest of his work—rattled along with decent sales, the occasional reprint, and was even resurrected as a 1950s pulp-fiction paperback with a come-on tag line (“A surging novel of torment and desire”) and a lurid cover: busty peasant girl pouting in a barn, her skirt hiked over her knees, while a hunky guy lurks at the door—price twenty-five cents. Camus had labored for years on his novel of alienation; his Carnets record his frustration and false starts. “The fewer novels or plays you write—because of other parasitic interests—the fewer you will have the ability to write,” V. S. Pritchett once wrote, lamenting his own small fictional output. “The law ruling the arts is that they must be pursued to excess.”
