I see by the papers that Alain Robbe-Grillet has died. The juxtaposition may sound odd, but his writing has exerted an enormous influence on my own. Just after my college years, I read Robbe-Grillet avidly. In Pour un Nouveau Roman (Toward a New Novel), he discusses the human drive to create meaning through metaphor and the countervailing moral imperative to see our surroundings with a neutral eye. Somewhere he says that in canonical fiction the fate of the environment echoes the fate of the person—like the corrupt protagonist, the great mansion rots from its foundations and tumbles to the ground. In the new novel, he says, the reader who turns the pages to seek such analogies will find himself at the end of the book with not a word read. Robbe-Grillet specialized in depicting the unreliable object. His principle was construire en détruisant, creating truer meaning through undercutting expectations. I used his ideas openly and directly in my novel, Spectacular Happiness. But it seems to me that his philosophy pervades my work—that I have been engaged in a process of struggling to discern when meaning is present and when frustratingly absent.