This avant-gardist "new novel" from 1965 hovers somewhere between a prose poem and an extended film treatment for an impressionistic thriller. The narrative continuity is distorted in every possible way, with flashbacks, flashforwards, conjectures coalescing as accounts, descriptions dissolving into perspectives, and frames imposed and broken in many other ways. There are plays performed at parties, and a passage that begins by describing action on stage may move seamlessly into an apparent real-world setting, or vice versa. Similar liberties are taken with a group of sculptures on the grounds of the Blue Villa (the Maison of the title), and with conversations of various sorts.

The first-person narrator is far from omniscient, offering numerous contradictions, and sometimes pausing to question details in the story being told. It is not even clear whether the Blue Villa is truly in Hong Kong, or whether it is merely a place where reminiscences and/or fantasies about Hong Kong find a home. There is a short list of characters who are multiplied by the effects of perspective, as demonstrated in their repeatedly-transformed names: Ava, Eva, Eve; Johnson, Johnston, Jonestone; Loraine, Lauren, and so on.

To the extent that a plot makes itself detectable, it involves human trafficking, the narcotics trade, Cold War espionage, elite society intrigue, murder, and even cannibalism. But the focus is on recurring motifs told with conspicuously similar details, such as travels by taxi, a girl walking a dog, a transaction over a desk, menace from the authorities, a magazine advertisement, a woman lying on her side and propped on one elbow. At points, the story re-enters a familiar groove and contents itself with an "etc." or even "etc. etc."

There are no chapter divisions, and the story "resolves" only in the manner of a musical composition, by returning to the chord which is thus revealed to be its tonic. Avowedly a fiction, it avoids showing the reader enough consistency or narrative authority to determine an "objective" course of events in the surfeit of description. Instead, the dreamlike associations of the text invite the reader to share in the manicured fantasy where the author wanders.

זה הספיק לי כדוגמה מין ה"רומן החדש" ( )