On Monday, the Democratic congresswomen Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar, who were recently barred from entering Israel, held a joint press conference in St. Paul, Minnesota, which is in Omar’s district. “The decision to ban me and my colleague, the first two Muslim-American women elected to Congress, is nothing less than an attempt by an ally of the United States to suppress our ability to do our jobs as elected officials,” Omar told a roomful of reporters. Tlaib, who wavered over but finally rejected an offer to visit her grandmother in the West Bank on humanitarian grounds, on the condition that Tlaib not promote boycotts, choked back tears as she recalled visiting the West Bank as a child. “I watched as my mother had to go through dehumanizing checkpoints, even though she was a United States citizen and proud American,” she said.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s decision to ban the two women was all but dictated by President Trump, who tweeted, last week, “It would show great weakness if Israel allowed Rep. Omar and Rep. Tlaib to visit. They hate Israel & all Jewish people, & there is nothing that can be said or done to change their minds.” It was also a public-relations disaster for the Israeli government, as Netanyahu undoubtedly understood. Members of Congress—Republicans as well as Democrats—have come out against the Prime Minister’s decision. In a rare move, AIPAC, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, expressed disapproval of the ban, stating that, while it disagreed with Omar and Tlaib’s “anti-Israel” positions, “We also believe every member of Congress should be able to visit and experience our democratic ally Israel firsthand.”

In Israel, the government’s decision has struck a nerve. Most Israeli analysts believe that, once Trump broadcast his displeasure with the visit, “Netanyahu had no choice but to say amen,” as Arye Mekel, a veteran diplomat, wrote, in Haaretz. Where Israelis are divided, however, is on whether throwing in Israel’s lot with Trump and the Republican Party was prudent to begin with. Trump has been almost too good a benefactor to Netanyahu. For years, the U.S. held out moving its Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem and recognizing the Golan Heights as part of Israel as steps it might take if Israel restarted negotiations with the Palestinians. Trump simply took those steps, no questions asked. Then, with his message about Omar and Tlaib, Trump came asking. Yair Lapid, of the centrist Blue and White party, which hopes to unseat Netanyahu in Israel’s September elections, called the decision to ban their entry a “serious mistake” that “harms our relationship with the Democratic Party.”

The visit that Omar and Tlaib had planned was, undeniably, a challenge to the Israeli government. Their tentative itinerary, titled “Delegation to Palestine,” did not include meetings at the Knesset; its purpose, Omar said, “was to witness firsthand what is happening on the ground in Palestine and hear from stakeholders.” Omar, at the press conference, said that their travel plans had been “nearly identical” to those from an earlier trip taken by members of Congress, presumably a 2016 delegation of five House Democrats, who, as Politico first reported, had also listed “Palestine” as their main destination. But those members had been to Israel in the past, or had otherwise expressed support for the country, and they had met with several lawmakers from the Joint List, an alliance of predominantly Arab parties in the Knesset. Unlike Omar and Tlaib, they were not affiliated with the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement, a diffuse and fractious pro-Palestinian effort with plenty of ideological ambiguity. While many of the B.D.S. movement’s supporters are part of the American liberal mainstream, which increasingly seeks to exert pressure on the Israeli government to end its military subjugation of the Palestinian people, the B.D.S. leadership objects to Israel’s existence as a Jewish state. This summer, the Times asked Omar Barghouti, a founder of the movement, whether Jews were entitled to their own state. He answered, in no uncertain terms, “Not in Palestine.”

The controversy over Omar and Tlaib has exposed a growing rift in Israel over how to respond to B.D.S. supporters. A 2017 Israeli law bars admittance to foreign citizens who publicly promote boycotts of the country. The law takes a “moral and principled stance,” Tzipi Hotovely, Israel’s deputy foreign minister, said on Monday, arguing that Israel had little choice but to refuse the congresswomen entry. But, as Israelis who opposed the government’s entry ban quickly pointed out, the law reserves the right of Israel’s interior minister to make exceptions, and had been used only about a dozen times since its passage—rarely against Americans. “A democratic country can’t deny entry to elected officials of a friendly democracy,” Tamar Zandberg, of the leftist Meretz Party, said in a statement.

Yet the organization that arranged Omar and Tlaib’s visit, as well as that of the 2016 delegation, a Palestinian group called Miftah, rightly gave many Israelis pause. In the past, Miftah has praised Palestinian terrorists on its Web site and promoted an anti-Semitic article advancing a blood libel. (The organization later retracted it). But the leader of the group, Hanan Ashrawi, is no fringe actor: she is a seasoned politician who once served as a spokeswoman for the Palestinian delegation to peace talks with Israel. Were negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians ever to resume, the Israelis would have to reckon with Miftah and groups like it.

Netanyahu, trying to account for having reversed course on Omar and Tlaib’s entry, also pointed to the fact that the congresswomen’s itinerary didn’t include meetings with members of the Israeli parliament. But, although they hadn’t planned on visiting the Knesset, Omar had planned on meeting Aida Touma-Sliman, of the Joint List. I spoke with Touma-Sliman on Sunday, at the time she was supposed to have met with Omar in Jerusalem. She wouldn’t tell me where their meeting was to have been held, only that it wasn’t at the Knesset. (This was also true of the 2016 delegation, which met with Arab lawmakers at a restaurant in an East Jerusalem hotel.) Had they met, Touma-Sliman told me, she would have drawn parallels for Omar between the Israeli government’s treatment of Palestinians and its own Arab citizens and President Trump’s treatment of immigrants. She considered Netanyahu’s reversal a “clear and direct order from Trump” but claimed that it was merely a “convergence of positions that is very much in line with their over-all attitude toward minorities.” She added, “Netanyahu and Trump are like twins.”

While the Joint List supports boycotting products made in settlements, it does not support the B.D.S. movement. As Touma-Sliman told me, “We believe in exerting pressure from within the political system. We want to fight the occupation—not the citizens of Israel.”

As part of their itinerary in Israel, the congresswomen were supposed to tour the city of Hebron with Breaking the Silence, a nonprofit Israeli organization whose members are former Israel Defense Forces soldiers who now actively oppose the occupation. This would not have been the organization’s first meeting with members of Congress, its executive director, Avner Gvaryahu, told me on Sunday. He refused to name other members with whom he had met, but added that he had also given tours to delegations that had entered the country with AIPAC. Gvaryahu called the Israeli government’s decision not to admit Omar and Tlaib “unbelievable hypocrisy.” “One of the right-wing government’s main arguments against us has always been that we are using international attention or pressure to air our dirty laundry outside. And now the government is caving to international pressure and changing its policy. And the right is applauding.”

Gvaryahu saw the government’s move to separate Tlaib and Omar’s official visit from Tlaib’s humanitarian visit as indicative of its broader attitude toward Palestinians. “There’s a military concept that we, as former soldiers, know well, which is ‘fabric of life.’ It says that we shouldn’t interfere with the Palestinians’ ‘fabric of life’ as long as it aligns with our perception of reality. In other words, ‘We have no problem with you as a granddaughter, but we can’t tolerate you as an autonomous person with positions and opinions and wishes.’ It’s a classic stance of seeing Palestinians as a nuisance on the way to achieving our broader goal, which is the continuation of the occupation.”

When I asked Gvaryahu about the congresswomen’s vocal support of the movement to boycott Israel, he cited that as the very reason that allowing them to hear voices of criticism within Israel would have been powerful. “Part of what we bring to the table is to show that there are Israeli citizens who are fighting for the future of this place who don’t buy into this lie that says that supporting Israel equates supporting the occupation,” Gvaryahu said. It’s a distinction that he and other Israeli activists wished that Omar and Tlaib could see for themselves.

At some point this summer, I opened my eyes, and taxidermy was everywhere. On the first page of Ocean Vuong’s poetic new novel, “On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous,” a buck’s head hangs over the soda machine at a Virginia rest stop, its black glass eyes embodying “a death that won’t finish, a death that keeps dying.” A friend forwarded me a trailer for a documentary, “Stuffed,” about the “craft, technique, and obsession” that informs “the world of modern taxidermy,” with its bro-ey enthusiasts and feminist millennials. Another friend directed me to Instagram’s #taxidermy hashtag, which is flourishing like nightshade. What was once a curio—a relic of hobbyists and museums—had found, it seemed, new life.

The latest data point is “Mostly Dead Things,” the début novel by Kristen Arnett, which, in June, became the first title from the Portland-based publisher Tin House to reach the New York Times best-seller list. The book follows Jessa-Lynn Morton, a queer taxidermist who is grieving her father’s suicide. She is also grieving the sudden departure of Brynn, her lover and her brother’s wife. Brynn, who grew up with the Mortons, in central Florida, was cruel and irresistible; when she runs off, leaving behind two children and her heartbroken husband, Jessa-Lynn tries to suppress the pain, remembering that her father “was always proudest when I refused to show weakness.” Arnett’s quirky setup—a sibling love triangle, dead animals—might have heralded a twee, put-a-bird-on-it story, but the writing is subtle and meditative, with the tactile weight of dense fur.

Prentice Morton, Jessa-Lynn’s father, was also a taxidermist, and taxidermy is how his closed-off, hard-drinking daughter expresses her longing for him. As the new proprietor of his shop, she replicates his techniques and tends to his prized creations. Jessa-Lynn, whose last name, from the Latin mortis, echoes the family’s calling, does not seek simply to preserve her father by carrying on his work; she is also, in a way, stuffing herself into his skin. Taxidermy is her mourning ritual, an attempt to suspend her father, like one of his mounted deer, between life and death.

It’s a moving theme, if not a new one. Taxidermy, or the practice of mounting animal pelts and arranging them in poses, has a quiet, curious life in fiction. Something about it seems to flick the literary imagination, perhaps because it proves a potent metaphor for art. Fiction often attempts to capture reality without being coldly mimetic; taxidermy reveals the stakes of that project. A skin, like a character on the page, is manipulated, adjusted so as to evoke life. But it never fully succeeds, and this gives the stuffed creature a primal, spooky gravity—an aura of emptiness so staggering that the onlooker feels at risk. A taxidermied animal conveys a particular truth with terrible efficiency: when we try to possess things forever, we lose them.

And yet the traditional taxidermy tale, the form that Vuong invokes and Arnett turns inside out, tends to provoke horror, not sadness. Its emphasis falls on the folly of killing the thing that you wish would endure; terror burgeons in the gap between what was desired and what was achieved. In “The Landlady,” a short story by Roald Dahl that originally appeared in The New Yorker, in 1959, a seventeen-year-old named Billy Weaver is murdered and taxidermied by an older woman running a bed and breakfast. Billy enters the inn on a whim, charmed by a cute dachshund that he sees, through the window, curled up by the hearth. The proprietor strikes Billy as sweet, if a touch batty, and he accepts her invitation to tea. Their conversation turns to two handsome boys who stayed at the inn prior to Billy’s arrival; the old woman mentions that these boys never left. The tea tastes a bit like the landlady smells: herbal, bitter. After Billy realizes that the dachshund is stuffed, the story ends, with his host beaming creepily at him and poison seeping through his limbs.

The tale is classic Dahl: spry and delicately ghoulish. The awfulness of the uncanny dog takes center stage. “He put out a hand and touched it gently on the top of its back,” Dahl writes. “The back was hard and cold, and when he pushed the hair to one side with his fingers, he could see the skin underneath, greyish-black and dry and perfectly preserved.” The story’s dread has a gendered quality. Billy, vigorously male but innocent enough to require a caregiver, longs to work in business, where all the men seem “fantastically brisk.” The woman, meanwhile, acts maternal—her peculiar hobby perhaps belongs among the domestic crafts—but bestows a facsimile of life instead of the real thing. Taxidermy, and by extension, art, does not come off well in Dahl’s story; it scans as sterile motherhood. The landlady remains a cipher, and yet a faint aspect of loss haloes her. At one point, Billy speculates that she probably had a son killed in the war.

Taxidermy arose, in Egypt, out of the belief that spirits in the afterlife would only recognize the dead if they were realistically preserved. The technique's heyday came in the Victorian era, as biologists studied stuffed creatures, and the general public, in museums and private homes, appreciated their aesthetic qualities. These specimens inspired a sense of wonder—before the advent of photography, many Westerners would never otherwise see, for instance, a lion or a parrot—but their popularity also reflected the casual cruelty of the past, when less value was placed on both human and animal life. In an England of mass hangings, what was the shooting and skinning of one gazelle?

Now the art has evolved; modern practitioners prefer materials that are ethically sourced—either recycled or culled from animals that have died of natural causes—and the “rogue taxidermy” movement, which was founded in 2004, reimagines corpses as sculptures rather than as trophies or representations of nature. But the form still has a tinge of kitsch, its extravagant morbidity shading into camp or humor. The work of the artist Damien Hirst captures taxidermy’s hard-to-place, melodramatic eeriness: “Away from the Flock,” from 1994, shows a lamb immersed in a tank of formaldehyde solution, its cuddly body somehow transformed by the pulsing, otherworldly blue of the chemical. In interviews, Hirst spoke of his work’s “tragic beauty,” the way it distilled “that failure of trying so hard to do something that you destroy the thing that you’re trying to preserve.”

The most famous example of literary taxidermy is a study in such failure. In 1959, the same year that The New Yorker ran “The Landlady,” Robert Bloch published a thriller called “Psycho.” The novel features a disturbed man, Norman Bates, in the thrall of his mother, with whom he runs a motel. Bloch presents the old woman as domineering and codependent, even murderous—she may be responsible for two slayings that occur in their establishment. But Norman turns out to be the villain—and a taxidermist. Years ago, after his mother took a lover, he poisoned her in a jealous rage, made it look like a suicide, and mummified her. Norman, who is revealed to have dissociative identity disorder, committed the murders; he puts on his mother’s clothes, speaks in her voice, and unleashes violence on her behalf. Becoming Mrs. Bates is one way for Norman to hold onto her; taxidermying her is another.

Here, as in “The Landlady,” and as in the unending death of Vuong’s buck, taxidermy reverses the course of nature. But “Psycho” opens up new, grotesque seams in the trope. The act of preserving a corpse implies fetishization, an unseemly privileging of the physical. It highlights Norman’s weirdly attentive, eroticized relationship to his mother’s body. He has the same worshipful connection to her shawls and jewelry, which he drapes over himself like a second skin. And so taxidermy provides a metaphor for his cross-dressing, the way he slips out of his identity and assumes another’s. In “Psycho,” taxidermy evokes a world in which the self is unmoored and fluid. Gender in particular becomes aqueous, a cast of mind. If “The Landlady” expresses a quiet anxiety about women, “Psycho” is panicking about masculinity. Taxidermy, with its must and gamey sexuality, is the skeleton on which that panic hangs.

Jessa-Lynn Morton, like Norman Bates, must become her parent. She must take over her father’s business, pay off his debts, and provide for her family. And yet Arnett, rather than using taxidermy to sensationalize this process, presents the craft as a moving testament to what art cannot do. It cannot turn Jessa-Lynn into Prentice or bring him back. It cannot mend the relationship between her brother, Milo, and his father, or between either of the Morton siblings and Brynn. Even Jessa-Lynn’s best work, a glorious trio of peacocks, shines “like pyrite,” Arnett writes. Seeking the wealth of eternity, the taxidermist’s hands only ever clutch at fool’s gold.

But taxidermy can, Arnett argues, bring us closer to life. Most taxidermy stories hold their animals at a remove, framing them as either pedagogical—fodder for exhibition—or perverse. Arnett, transposing the metaphor out of the horror genre, closes the distance between viewer and viewed. She takes taxidermy seriously as a craft, not just as a device; she makes it real and intimate. There is her narrator, caring for a frayed seam in ways that she cannot care for herself. There is the body of a rabbit, asphyxiated by carbon monoxide in the garage, honored and painstakingly restored. “We pieced together life from the remnants of death,” Jessa-Lynn says, introducing her trade. This idea, of using imagination to restore some fraction of a lost wholeness, is accentuated by Jessa-Lynn’s mother, who processes her husband’s suicide by deconstructing his specimens and reconstituting them as X-rated sculptures. In one instance, a water buffalo, Christmas lights dangling from a gash in its belly, dons S & M gear.

Here, taxidermy becomes a way to instantiate our relationship to bodies—both our own and those of others. Much of this has to do with Arnett’s approach to the “between-ness” of a stuffed creature, the way it evokes both life and the lifelike. The book meditates on the liminal, and even Jessa-Lynn’s queerness—her body’s fluidity in relation to others—is linked to her profession. “Taxidermy is queering,” Arnett, who identifies as a lesbian, wrote, in Hazlitt. “It is an othering, and that is also me, a thing queered up and fucked up and positioned with intent.” In “Psycho,” taxidermy promised a reprieve from gender binaries, the signifiers of which might be picked up or put aside like one of Mrs. Bates’s shawls. But Bloch used taxidermy to hint at sexual deviance; “Mostly Dead Things” rescues the craft’s physicality, infusing its attention to the body with a this-worldly sensuousness. The “glinting red maw” of a bear’s mouth is of a piece with Brynn’s remembered lips. In bed with a new lover, Jessa-Lynn watches the woman’s finger tracing “a line from my face down the naked center of my body. ‘Where’s your seam?’ Finger tickling, searching. ‘Where do you crawl out?’ ”

Arnett’s interest in the carnality of taxidermy, the extent to which it depends on touch, flows in part from her belief that the physical is political. Being gay neither traumatizes nor defines Jessa-Lynn, but to move through the world as a queer woman—to undergo, in Arnett’s phrase, “an othering”—might be to know a visceral sense of wrongness, similar to the unease a mounted animal inspires. One thinks of “Citizen: An American Lyric,” the book-length poem, from 2014, by Claudia Rankine. Rankine intersperses lines of text with images that conjure black history and myth. One such image is a photograph of “Little Girl,” a sculpture, by Kate Clark, that places a human face on the taxidermied form of a baby caribou. The hybrid creature stares from the page, at once pathetic and powerful—she is young and hunted, but charged with ancestral eloquence. Rankine is exploring the experience of marginalization. Clark’s work, alluring and repellant, generates a disturbance that mirrors the state of self-alienation. And yet its physicality subsumes these ideas: “Little Girl” is overwhelming as an artifact, a bodily presence. “I am fascinated by affect, by positioning, and by intimacy,” Rankine said, discussing her use of the photograph in an interview. “What happens when I stand close to you? What’s your body going to do? What’s my body going to do?”

These questions would not be out of place in “Mostly Dead Things,” in which taxidermy suggests how, in love, one person becomes new in the hands of another. Vuong imagined his buck as a corpse that never stops dying. Dahl and Bloch saw taxidermies as semblances of lost beloveds. But, for Arnett, to be a taxidermied thing is to be “positioned with intent”—to have, perhaps, a self that is both natural and constructed. A taxidermied thing moves with agility between and around categories: art and nature, life and death. It gives characters the freedom, the ability, to step out of their skins. And it gives readers a fresh way to think about fiction itself, which lives, or half lives, on the rippling cusp of the real.

It is one of the ironies of the writer’s predicament that self-expression can become fate. The fiction lays a fetter on the life. F. Scott Fitzgerald, for instance, virtually described his own funeral in “The Great Gatsby.” Vaguely, the reader comes to see the writer as nothing more than one of his or her own characters; the suspicion that literature occurs entirely within the bounds of personality is confirmed. A kind of disappointment afflicts our feelings about writers, as it does not those about other artists. It is as though they have crushed our illusions about human destiny. They have described existence, but they have failed to transcend it.

The obituaries that followed Françoise Sagan’s death, in 2004, were full of the sense of this failure. She had become, we were told, a tragic figure: destitute, isolated, tainted by scandal and alcoholism. She had, of course, produced many books, but none as successful and hence as troubling to history as her first, which was published when she was just nineteen. In that book, “Bonjour Tristesse,” she described the hedonism and amorality of youth, the hedonism and amorality of well-heeled French intellectuals, the hedonism and amorality of postwar Europe on the cusp of the sixties. Not surprisingly, it was the hedonism and amorality of her life that interested the obituary writers. For there it was, her fetter, her fate: from this slender, misunderstood novel, and from its young heroine, Cécile, Françoise Sagan never escaped. “Bonjour Tristesse” concludes with a fatal car accident, and three years after its publication Sagan, whose love of dangerous driving forms part of the legend of her life, sustained severe head injuries when her Aston Martin crashed at high speed. The disappointment among the obituary writers that the author did not submit then and there to her fictional destiny was palpable.

The hedonism and amorality of “Bonjour Tristesse” is of a most artistically proper kind. Morality, and its absence, is the novel’s defining theme: in this sense, Sagan is far more of a classicist than others of her existentialist brethren, such as Sartre and Camus. Certainly, she concerns herself with the twentieth-century problem of personal reality, of the self and its interaction with behavioral norms, but in “Bonjour Tristesse” those norms are as much psychic as they are societal. Cécile, a motherless seventeen-year-old whose permissive, feckless father has provided the only yardstick for her personal conduct, offers Sagan a particularly naked example of the human sensibility taking shape. Cécile’s encounters with questions of right and wrong, and with the way those questions cut across her physical and emotional desires, constitute an interrogation of morality that is difficult to credit as the work of an eighteen-year-old author. What is the moral sense? Where does it come from? Is it intrinsic? If not, does that discredit morality itself? These are the questions that lie at the heart of Sagan’s brief and disturbing novel.

Cécile and her father, Raymond, have decided to rent a summer villa on the Côte d’Azur for two months. Raymond is bringing his girlfriend, Elsa, along for the holiday, though Cécile is anxious that the reader should not disapprove: “I must explain this situation at once, or it might give a false impression. My father was forty, and had been a widower for fifteen years.” Notice that it is Raymond who has been bereaved, not Cécile herself: she tells us only that she had been at boarding school until two years earlier. She recalls her father’s embarrassment at her ugly dress and plaited hair when he came to collect her from the station. It is as though they had not seen each other for years; as though Cécile, between the ages of two and fifteen, was an orphan. “And then in the car his sudden triumphant joy because he saw I had his eyes, his mouth, and I was going to be for him the dearest, most marvellous of toys.”

At the villa, the trio are contentedly idle. They swim and sunbathe; they are untroubled by a sense of duty or compunction. Raymond does beach exercises to diminish his belly. The beautiful, vapid, red-haired Elsa badly burns her skin. Cécile, who has recently failed her exams, lies on the beach, running sand through her fingers: “I told myself that it ran out like time. It was an idle thought, and it was pleasant to have idle thoughts, for it was summer.” One day, a young man capsizes his sailing boat in their cove. This is Cyril, an ardent, good-looking university student, who offers to teach Cécile how to sail. He is the ideal prospect for a summer romance.

Chance, impulse, happenstance: this is how life unfolds in the world of Raymond and Cécile. They do not concern themselves with order and structure, the resistance to certain desires and the aspiration toward certain goals. Even Elsa merely submits to the sun’s power to burn her. Is this the correct way to live? The question does not arise; there is no one to ask it. Until, that is, Raymond announces one evening that he has invited a woman named Anne Larsen to stay. The first thing we learn about Anne is that she was a friend of Cécile’s dead mother. With the mother, the whole lost world of order, nurture, and morality is invoked. Anne is the emissary of that world: “I knew that once she was there it would be impossible for any of us to relax completely,” Cécile says. “Anne gave a shape to things and a meaning to words that my father and I preferred to ignore. She set a standard of good taste and fastidiousness which one could not help noticing in her sudden withdrawals, the look on her face, and her hurt silences.” Anne is beautiful, sophisticated, successful; and, unlike Cécile, Raymond, and Elsa, she is an adult, with an adult’s power of censure and moral judgment.

Cyril, too, is an adult—he is shocked by Raymond and Elsa’s ménage, and apologizes to Cécile for kissing her. “You have no protection against me. . . . I might be the most awful cad for all you know,” he says, in a most un-cad-like way. When Anne arrives, it is clear that she means to take Raymond and Cécile in hand. It is clear, too, that she is in love with Raymond, and that Raymond has reached for her in a bid to escape the childlike emotional world that he inhabits. Elsa is dispatched; the mature, glacial Anne is installed. Soon she and Raymond announce their plans to marry; immediately, Anne begins to impose her will on Cécile. She orders her to eat more, to study in her room instead of going to the beach, to cease outright her relations with Cyril. Is this love or hatred? Is it nurture or control? Is it what Cécile has missed out on by not having a mother, or what her motherlessness has exposed her to?

Sagan records clearly the new regime’s effect on Cécile: “It was this I held against Anne: she kept me from liking myself. I . . . had been forced by her into self-criticism and a guilty conscience.” In one sense, then, morality is a form of self-hatred; it is a wound one assuages by wounding others in precisely the same way. But Anne has done something else—she has stolen Cécile’s father, her one source of unconditional love. Raymond is now estranged from his daughter; he has disarmed and abandoned her. Cécile the divided girl is forced into immorality: she wishes to get rid of Anne and regain Raymond. Her actual powerlessness gives rise to fantasies of power, and these thoughts cause her to oscillate between hatred and terrible guilt. Here, then, is an indictment of morality, at least as it is lived by Anne. Anne has fomented violence in Cécile’s pacific nature. By controlling her, and by interfering with her source of love, she has given her the capacity to do wrong.

This is a masterly portrait that can be read as a critique of family life, the treatment of children and the psychic consequences of different forms of upbringing. One day, Anne locks Cécile in her room, after an argument about schoolwork. At first, Cécile panics, and flings herself at the door like a wild animal. “This was my first contact with cruelty.” Then her heart is hardened, her duplicity sealed: “I lay stretched out, on my bed, and began to plan my revenge.” The form this revenge takes occupies the final section of the book, and is almost theatrical in its psychological grandeur. Cécile chooses as her tools her father’s childishness, Anne’s intransigence, Elsa’s vanity, and Cyril’s responsible nature, and with them she forges a plot in which each of the four is utterly at her mercy. As a dramatist, she experiences, for the first time, complete power over others. Her plot is tragic and bitter, but it plays uninterrupted to its end. Neither right nor wrong winds up the victor of this battle. It is insight, the writer’s greatest gift, that wins.

Sagan’s second novel, “A Certain Smile,” is in many ways a sequel to “Bonjour Tristesse.” Several of the familiar themes are there: the search for and betrayal of the lost mother; the double nature of father/lover and lover/brother; the defense of boredom or nothingness as a moral position more truthful than conventionality. Dominique, a law student at the Sorbonne, meets Luc, the married uncle of her boyfriend, Bertrand. Luc and his kindly wife, Françoise, take Dominique under their wing, for she is uncared-for and alone, the daughter of provincial parents rendered more remote by their unassuageable grief over the death, some years earlier, of “a son,” as Dominique puts it. Like Cécile, Dominique struggles to maintain the dignity of her own reality, to assert its truth, however abnormal other people might claim to find it.

Luc quickly begins to make advances toward Dominique, even as Françoise envelopes her in mother-love. Dominique profits from their attention but can find no moral path through it, for the two forms of affection—sexual and parental—are confused. Luc proposes that Dominique come away with him and have a brief affair, at the end of which he will return to Françoise. Once again, the father figure is identified with an aberrant morality that results in the girl’s betrayal of the mother figure. More important, he denies her emotional reality: according to Luc, his affair with Dominique can proceed only on the basis that she does not love him.

The nature of love is the novel’s central preoccupation. The uncanny maturity that made Sagan’s name as a novelist is most strongly in evidence in her astute portrayal of love as a psychical event that has its roots in family life and the early formation of personality. To the modern reader, Luc’s conduct toward Dominique has strong undercurrents of abuse: her violent emotional trauma in the aftermath of the affair, and the novel’s exquisitely ambivalent ending, go far beyond poignancy or even frankness. “Something is rotten in the state of Denmark!” Dominique finds herself repeating, without knowing why. Sagan’s sense of emotional tragedy is indeed that of the great dramatists.

“Much of the time life is a sort of rhythmic progression of three characters,” Sagan said in an interview, shortly before the publication of “A Certain Smile.” In “Bonjour Tristesse,” this tenet is illustrated almost sculpturally, when Cécile describes the three adults standing on the stairs the night Raymond transfers his affections from Elsa to Anne: “I remember the scene perfectly. First of all, in front of me, Anne’s golden neck and perfect shoulders, a little lower down my father’s fascinated face and extended hand, and, off in the background, Elsa’s silhouette.” These two novels, so spare and rigorous, so artistically correct, so thorough in their psychological realism, are the highest expression of the triangular purity of their author’s strange and beautiful esthétique.

This essay was drawn from “Coventry: Essays,” which Farrar, Straus and Giroux will publish in September.