“The Voyeur” is Alain Robbe-Grillet’s second novel, first published in 1955. The plot is simple, bare: Mathias, an itinerant watch salesman, takes an early morning ferry to the island of his birth, purportedly to make sales. It’s a three-hour crossing. Arriving shortly after ten on an unseasonably warm April morning, Mathias has roughly six hours to canvass the island before the ferry departs for the mainland at four. It’s a Tuesday. The next ferry-crossing isn’t until the following Friday. If Mathias misses the boat, he’ll have to stay on the island till then. These specifics aren’t insignificant: Mathias is obsessed by them. As the boat makes its slow approach to the island’s harbour, Mathias attempts to calculate, with painful and comical exactitude, how to maximize his brief time on the island so as to turn the greatest profit, i.e: to sell all of the eighty-nine watches in his suitcase in six hours. The stakes are high: “He really needed the money.”

Naturally it comes as a surprise to the reader that, despite his urgent calculations on the boat, Mathias loses track of time at a cafe in town while he waits for a garageman to fetch him a bicycle. Yet the degree to which Mathias begins to squander his day on the island is ambiguous at first because Robbe-Grillet is a writer who distorts time. Two pages of description can span a single minute, maybe less. What fills those two pages, as anyone familiar with Robbe-Grillet and the nouveau roman will know, is microscopic detail of the external world, of objects, gestures and shapes, as perceived by our protagonist. This is starkly different from stream-of-consciousness, or interior monologue: this is exterior monologue, a term applied to the works of Robbe-Grillet and his cohorts that I picked up from an Entitled Opinions podcast about the nouveau roman.

In “The Voyeur,” the devil is in the recurring details. Robbe-Grillet is constantly returning the reader’s attention to the contents of a pocket on Mathias’s duffle coat. There we find a hemp cord he picks up on the boat, as well as cigarettes and a package of gumdrops he buys in town. Why does he feel compelled to pick up the cord and conceal it in his pocket? In flashbacks of his childhood, Mathias is a collector of pieces of string. But is this a realistic adult hobby? And why the gumdrops, if he doesn’t show interest in eating them? At a later point in the novel, the hemp cord is mysteriously missing from his pocket.

The rare insight we get into Mathias’s psychology is through his observation of girls. Whether it’s a young barmaid in a cafe or a girl on a movie poster or one in a photograph, through Mathias’s eyes, they are all timorous and supplicant. The napes of their necks are usually exposed. Piece these together – the contents of his pocket, his way of seeing girls, the deviation from his purpose – and we arrive at the suspicion that something sinister is at work in the mind of our protagonist. The novel builds its suspense on this unsettling suspicion (a suspicion that remains unconfirmed).

In an interview in The Paris Review, Robbe-Grillet says this of Dostoevsky’s “Crime and Punishment”: “I am much more interested in the first part which is the preparation for the murder. You remember the scene where Raskolnikov is getting the axe ready? And he is fascinated by the act he has to accomplish? The last part of the book, about guilt and moral responsibility and so on, bores me profoundly.” When the interviewer asks him if it’s because neither he nor his characters feel moral responsibility or guilt, Robbe-Grillet answers emphatically: “Never!” And so what we have in “The Voyeur” is something akin to the first part of “Crime and Punishment.” There is no last part, no attempt to moralize or explain the novel’s apparent crime, or redeem its apparent criminal.

“The Voyeur” is Robbe-Grillet’s theories of a new novel put to practice. In the same Paris Review interview, addressing his decision to insert an imaginary character into his autobiography “The Mirror That Returns,” Robbe-Grillet says, “[i]t doesn’t matter which has been born of experience and which belongs to the imagination.” Thus, at the end of “The Voyeur,” Robbe-Grillet deprives his readers of the privilege to confidently differentiate between what was real and what was imagined.

As for those long, repetitive, geometrically precise descriptions of gestures, objects, and shapes, as committed as these descriptions are to the theories behind the novel, that doesn’t make them any less tedious to read. But when the details point obliquely to Mathias’s apparent crime – the contents of his pocket, for instance, or the timorous gesture of a barmaid – the attentive and clinical way in which they are described adds to the ominous mood of the text.

In spite of Robbe-Grillet’s avant-garde commitments, he writes riveting, conventional dialogue scenes. And Mathias’s Raskalnikov-esque paranoia about getting his alibi straight, when the author’s eye is focused on the internal world of his protagonist and not on his external perceptions, makes for some of the more captivating passages in the novel.