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She has rarely appeared in theater productions: Her last stage role was a decade ago, in Christophe Honoré’s “Nouveau Roman.”

With its nouveau roman asceticism, Handke’s writing typically leaves me with a sense of being kept on the outside of something that is cold, severe and not obviously enjoyable.

Not all experimentalists are so keen to advertise their debt to the past, but McCarthy, who reveres French theory and the French nouveau roman but also has a lot of time for Dickens and Plato and Cervantes, is unanxiously frank about the roots of his imagination.

The book is also a descendant of the nouveau roman, taking formal cues from and shaping its particular version of narrative play in the mold of the enigmatic novels of writers like Alain Robbe-Grillet, Michel Butor and Nathalie Sarraute.

The Franz Kafka and Samuel Beckett influences, which are prominent in previous work like “The Pets,” remain, though they are perhaps less pronounced here than the surrealist and nouveau roman touchstones.