Alain Robbe-Grillet is a French author, literary critic, and theorist of the nouveau roman (the new novel).  Robbe-Grillet's works lack conventional elements, such as dramatic plotting and psychological analysis of the character.  The novels are composed largely of recurring images, impersonally depicted physical objects and the random events of everyday life.  From his first novel, Les Gommes (1953, The Erasers), Robbe-Grillet has played with popular literary genres—several times with the traditional mystery novel, perhaps the most advanced example of self-contained literary form. The Erasers questioned the assumption of the traditional fiction that reality is both coherent and knowable. 

—"But you know there's no such thing as the perfect crime; we must look for the flaw that has to exist somewhere." 
—"Where are you going to look? Make no mistake about it, monsieur: this is the work of specialists, they've obviously left few things to chance; but what makes the few clues we have useless is our inability to test them against anything else."  (The Erasers) 

Alain Robbe-Grillet was born in Brest, Finistère.  He attended Lycée de Brest, Lyceées Buffon and St. Louis.  During World War II he worked in a German tank factory.  In 1944 he received a diploma from National Institute of Agronomy.  Between the years 1945 and 1949 he studied at National Statistical Institute in Paris, and then in 1949-51 at the Institute of Colonial Fruits and Crops.  Robbe-Grillet has worked as an agronomist, and from 1955 as a literary consultant at the French publishing house Editions de Minuit. 

The Erasers made Robbe-Grillet one of the leaders of the nouveau roman group.  It was followed by Le Voyeur (1955, The Voyeur), La Jalousie (1957, Jealousy), and Dans le Labyrinthe (1959, In the Labyrinth).  His statement of how he felt novels should be written was published in Pour un nouveau roman (1963).  "If in many of the passages that follow, I readily employ the term New Novel, it is not to designate a school, nor even a specific and constituted group of writers working in the same direction; the expression is merely a convenient label applicable to all those seeking new forms for the novel, form capable of expressing (or of creating) new relations between man and the world, to all those who hav edetermined to invent the novel, in other words, to invent man." 

Robbe-Grillet argued that the writer should content himself with the impersonal description of physical objects.  Not to flatter the bourgeois reader, psychological or ideological analysis should be excluded.  Despite its focus on objective reality, Robbe-Grillet insisted, the nouveau roman is entirely subjective—its world is always perceived through the eyes of a character, not an omniscient narrator. 

In Djinn (1981), Robbe-Grillet used another popular genre, the spy-story.  The protagonist works for an androgenous American spy, and after a while the story begins to fold back on itself.  La Maison de rendez-vous (1965) used several points of view, which contradicted each other.  The story, focusing on a evening get together, folds back on itself various times.  La Belle captive (1975) was based on the myth of the beautiful captive, and took its themes from the paintings of the French surrealist René Magritte, constructing a dream-like narrative suffused with eroticism, playfulness, and subversion. 

In 1984 Robbe-Grillet published Le Miroir qui revient, the first volume of an autobiographical trilogy, Romanesques.  In his latest works he has acknowledged Claude Simon's dictum that "everything is autobiographical, even the imaginary."  According to Robbe-Grillet, life is neither overtly meaningful nor absurd.  The theme of the labyrinth links Robbe-Grillet to Borges, but it also demonstrates his willingness to leave the reader to find his own way in the maze of possible interpretations. 

Robbe-Grillet's emphasis on the visual led him in the 1960s to writing scenarios and directing films.  These works have challenged the limits of expected narrative structures and conventional realism.  Robbe-Grillet's thesis is that the physical world is the only true reality and the only way to approach memory, is through physical objects.  The most famous dramatization of his literary theories is Alan Resnais's film Last Year at Marienbad, for which he wrote the screenplay.