If you came of age intellectually (or thought you did) in the early and mid 1960s, France was your lodestar. Budding teenaged existentialists holed up in their rooms in Frayser turned their lonely eyes to the novels and plays of Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus, to Jean Genet and Marguerite Duras and Alain Robbe-Grillet, to Ionesco, and, in cinema, to Truffaut and Godard. These writers and film-makers made hash of American pretensions, cutting through the baggage of traditional narrative structures and revealing the awful void that lay beneath the complacencies of postwar prosperity. Or so it seemed.

Robbe-Grillet died Monday at the age of 85, no longer the “enfant terrible” of the French literary world but a respected member of the Legion of Honor and the Academie Francaise. With his novel “The Erasers” (”Les Gommes”), published in 1953, Robbe-Grillet launched the Nouveau Roman or New Novel movement, a kind of fiction that eliminated such antiquated notions as plot, character devlopment and straightforward narrative for the sake of pure description, arbitrary psychology and scrambled chronology. Succeeding novels were “The Voyeur” (1955) and, published in one volume in 1959, “Jealousy” and “In the Labyrinth.” Robbe-Grillet solidified the motivations and techniques of the genre in the essay, “For a New Novel,” released in 1963 and instantly proclaimed as the essential guide to avant-garde ficition. Other practitioners of the New Novel style included Claude Simon, who won the Nobel Prize in 1985, and Nathalie Sarraute.

Reading Robbe-Grillets’ slim novels in those great old Grove Press paperback editions felt like striking a blow against the pomposity of the blowsy, soap-operaish fiction that dominated American literature in the 1950s and ’60s, books by such authors as James Jones and James Gould Cozzens, William Styron and Herman Wouk and late John Steinbeck, with their contrived complications and over-heated plots and over-worked symbolism. And compared to the lapidary, affectless prose and cool opacities of Robbe-Grillet’s fiction, the work of Jack Kerouac, a rebellious spirit and hero of my former beatnik era, seemed childish and unformed.

Would I think so highly of “The Erasers” and “The Voyeur” today? I don’t know. I haven’t read Robbe-Grillet in 40 years. I do know that after seeing the Robbe-Grillet-scripted film “Last Year at Marienbad” (1961), perhaps the most ambiguous and perplexing movie ever made, a few years ago, I found it utterly boring, though back in the day I saw it three times in succession, struck with awe and wonder and buoyed by the vast tolerance of youth.