Is it considered bad manners to question the choice of a Nobel laureate from one’s own country? If so, the French writer Frédéric-Yves Jeannet could be accused of a flagrant display of rudeness. In a diatribe in Le Monde’s “Débats” section recently, under the heading “Jean-Marie Le Clézio ou le Nobel immérité”, Jeannet, who is also a professor of literature at the University of Wellington in New Zealand, states that “it is not politically correct . . . to criticize Le Clézio, who is such an upholder, in these times of great confusion, of fine sentiments and noble causes” (see NB, October 17, for the announcement of the prize). He goes on to say that fine sentiments and noble causes don’t necessarily make for good literature. As if to bolster his position, Jeannet points out that, in 1985, someone he holds in high regard, but doesn’t name, wrote a piece stating that the award of the Nobel Prize that year to Claude Simon was a mark of shame for French literature (until Le Clézio, Simon had been the most recent French recipient of the award – if one excludes the Chinese writer in exile Gao Xingjian, who has French nationality and was Nobelled in 2000; Le Clézio, incidentally, has hailed Simon as “a marvellous writer”). Jeannet goes so far as to suggest that Hélène Cixous, or even Amélie Nothomb, might have been a more worthy French laureate. One could add Michel Tournier’s name to the mix, although his output, unlike Le Clézio’s, has slowed up considerably in recent years. Jeannet contends that only Le Clézio’s early fiction (which he admires) fits the Nobel committee’s assessment of his work as representing “rupture”. But the committee, in its curiously worded citation, also commended him as an “author of new departures, poetic adventure and sensual ecstasy, an explorer of a humanity beyond and below the reigning civilisation” – allusions to the writer’s passionate interest in non-European cultures and to novels chronicling lives of the downtrodden and dispossessed.

Jeannet complains that “Le Clézio has always been a verbose writer . . . . From 1980 onwards, he has written bestsellers” – clearly a pejorative term in this context. Jeannet picks on one of the author’s books – the only one he has to hand, as he unwisely, or calculatedly, lets slip – to make his case. L’Africain (2004) is an affecting memoir of Le Clézio’s father and full of fascinating material about the life of an up-country doctor in northern Nigeria in the 1930s, but Jeannet sees in it only banal language, and feels the need to give the author a lesson in how to construct a sentence. He ends by saying that the awarding of the prize to Le Clézio has “put French literature back several decades”.

A few days later Le Monde published a piece by Alain Mabanckou, a novelist and professor of literature at UCLA, rejecting Jeannet’s charges. In the meantime the paper had received a torrent of aggrieved responses from its readers, and felt obliged, in the words of its journalist Véronique Maurus, to reassure them that Jeannet’s piece was not commissioned but was offered and that it in no way represented the views of the paper (we are reminded that Le Monde published an editorial hailing the announcement of the prize). “Who is this Frédéric-Yves Jeannet?” seems to have been a recurrent question from the readers. Maurus goes on to explain that Jeannet is a writer well known in avant-garde circles, and points out that his obscurity shouldn’t disqualify him from expressing an opinion. (She might have added that the mainstream publishing house Flammarion have two of his novels in print.) Meanwhile, the writer Michel Rio weighed in, questioning Jeannet’s implication that bestsellers were necessarily bad books and arguing that Le Clézio’s writing displays a spirit of freedom and openness. In a particularly indignant letter, Claudine Dubois, a professor of modern literature from Lyon, criticized Jeannet for “an obsolete and over-technical vision of literature”, and suggested that writing fiction is about more than attempting to create perfect sentences.

As Jeannet implies, Le Clézio’s career can be divided into two phases: experimentalism up until 1980, when the publication of Désert heralded a more conventional narrative approach, which has not always been free of the banality Jeannet complains about. The distinguished writer Pierre Assouline, in welcoming Le Clézio’s prize, commended the accuracy, “for once”, of the Nobel citation, while also noting “an unfortunate boy scout vein” in his writing. He praised the restraint and maturity of Le Clézio's new novel, Ritournelle de la faim, which came out at the end of September. Opening in the 1930s, the story moves from Paris to Nice as we follow the fortunes of a twelve-year-old girl and her parents through the hardships of the Occupation. As we have come to expect, there are wonderful passages of description, notably of Rommel’s bedraggled army making its way up from the south coast of France towards the Alps and back to Germany. There is considerable narrative energy too: as Le Clézio eloquently demonstrated in his long and curiously underrated autobiographical novel Révolutions (2003), he can be a compelling storyteller. Jeannet will have taken weary note of the fact that Ritournelle de la faim is showing healthy sales.

Adrian Tahourdin is an editor at the TLS.

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