Book excerpt: During a period when the field of literary studies turned away from texts to "theory," Novel Configurations: A Study of French Fiction has become an underground classic. Although it proposes a theory, that theory is inductive and solidly based in real works of fiction. While looking again at significant masterpieces that range from the early nineteenth-to the late twentieth-centuries, from the creations of traditional french writers to that of an Argentine who spent most of his productive life in France. Allan H. Pasco has perceptively indicted new but valid close readings that have revolutionized our view of these works. He suggests that La Chartreuse de Parme is rigorously organized, that Balzac was a narrational minimalists, that Huysmans developed novelistic strategies that would be played out in the Nouvea Roman, that Proust intended good readers to come away from A la recherche du temps perdu with very different but complementary interpretations, that Robbe-Grillet's La Jalousie turns on a plot that seems strange only because it takes place in the mind of the narrator. From these philololgically sophisticated interpretations, Pasco lucidly, elegantly, and wittily points to categories that include all fiction. Concentrating on patterns and description, on the one hand, and external and internal organization, on the other, Novel configurations proposes a new classification that can be easily taught to novices though it will help even professional readers understand the most complex fictional innovations.