If readers could just take a tramway... could just hop aboard one that wanders down Literature Lane... Now they can... in this literary journey on which they will discover that, in reality, the French novel followed a continuous path in the 20^th century. On the way, readers will glimpse the new trends destined to leave their mark, or spot the inroads and extensive imprints of avant-gardism here and there. But for all of that, readers will see that there was no literary « break-up » regardless of what eschatologists, catastrophists or pessimists of every ilk and persuasion may have to say on the subject.
Naturally, the shifting variations of the French novel alternated, on occasion, from traditional to inventive, orderly to adventurous, affluent to austere and construction to destruction.
Shifting of words, shifting of one word for another. Sinuous sentence meanderings : long ones for Proust or Simon, short ones for Duras or Echenoz. Shifting of stories that, whether expansive or concise, tended to form a cycle, as in [Albert?] Cohen's Solal, or Mauriac's Thérèse Desqueyroux. Shifting of literary genres, too... yet ultimately remaining within one genre that was always the novel. Shifting in search of a lost genre, as so brilliantly exemplified by Gide in his only accomplished novel, Les Faux-Monnayeurs.