Les Belles Images

Beauvoir wrote Les Belles Images in 1964 and 1965, and Gallimard published it in Paris in October 1966. Patrick O'Brian's English translation appeared under the untranslated French title from Collins in London in 1968 and from G.P. Putnam's Sons in New York the same year. The book was Beauvoir's first novel in twelve years — since The Mandarins in 1954 — and it marked a change of direction: shorter, sharper, contemporary, and unmoored from the postwar-left milieu of her earlier fiction. The last three books she would publish in her lifetime (this one, The Woman Destroyed in 1967, and The Coming of Age in 1970) are the most compact and, in many ways, the most modern of her writing.

The book is Beauvoir's most sustained portrait of the French consumer capitalism of the mid-1960s — the world of the polished apartment, the second house, the discreetly kept lover, the Ministry of Culture salary and the advertising-agency salary and the technical consultancy salary that keep Laurence's circle above the waterline. Its title comes from the advertising slogan Laurence's agency has assigned itself and it invokes: 'belles images' — beautiful pictures — is what the agency produces and, by extension, what Laurence's family life is expected to look like. The novel is not against images. It is about what images are for.

It is also the piece of Beauvoir's fiction closest to what Marguerite Duras was writing on the same street at the same time. The prose is short-paragraphed, present-tense, close to Laurence's own consciousness, and organised by silence as much as by scene. Duras and Beauvoir did not much like each other's work; the closeness of Les Belles Images to Le Ravissement de Lol V. Stein (1964), which Duras had published two years earlier, is a coincidence of the moment rather than of an influence — but it is a real coincidence, and it puts Beauvoir's late fiction in the company it belongs in.

The novel opens on a spring evening in Paris. Laurence is on the balcony of her mother Dominique's flat — Dominique is fifty-eight, still handsome, still a name from her radio-journalism days, and freshly returned to Paris from a Sardinian holiday with her long-term lover Gilbert. Laurence's father is there, with his much younger companion Marthe; Laurence's husband Jean-Charles is there; the guests are talking about the new highways being cut through the outskirts of Paris and the summer house Dominique and Gilbert are thinking of buying in Corsica. The conversation is polished; the topics are polished; the wine and the platter of hors d'œuvres and the balcony view are polished. Laurence, thirty-two, an advertising creative in an agency that has just landed a new campaign, listens. She has been listening to this surface for years. She is beginning, in ways she cannot yet name, to be dissatisfied with it.

The middle section follows Laurence through the spring and summer. She has an affair with an older man named Lucien who is her physical opposite of Jean-Charles; the affair is a way of feeling something without particularly wanting more of it. Dominique, meanwhile, is discarded by Gilbert for a much younger woman named Patricia. Dominique's response is a slow-motion collapse: the discarded fifty-eight-year-old woman of Beauvoir's Second Sex analysis, made specific in one apartment in Paris. Laurence takes in her mother's situation with a mixture of horror, professional compassion, and a fear she cannot quite acknowledge — that she is looking at what she herself will be in twenty-six years unless she does something differently now. Meanwhile Catherine, at ten, comes home from school with more and more questions: about famine, about war in Vietnam, about the daughter of the concierge whose family is being evicted. Jean-Charles wants Catherine seen by a child psychiatrist; the questions are, he says, unhealthy.

The last third of the novel is the summer in Sardinia, the return to Paris, and Catherine's crisis. On the beach, Laurence tries to talk to Catherine about the things that have been troubling her; the conversation goes better than Laurence expected. Back in Paris, though, Jean-Charles has arranged an appointment with a well-known child psychiatrist. Laurence walks into her father's flat and asks him for advice. Her father — a man of the postwar left — tells her that she must let Catherine keep her questions; the disturbing thing about the world is that the world is disturbing, and there is no cure that is not a form of anaesthetic. Laurence walks home in the rain and cancels the appointment. The novel's last chapter is Laurence's decision: she will not send Catherine to be silenced.