Recommendations
Books Like Les Belles Images by Simone de Beauvoir
Books for readers who loved Beauvoir's satirical portrait of consumer-society France and Laurence's awakening
Les Belles Images (1966) is Beauvoir's final novel — a short, cold study of a successful Parisian advertising woman who begins to suspect that her carefully maintained life is a beautiful image concealing an essential emptiness. These 8 books share its satirical view of bourgeois prosperity, its portrait of a woman waking up inside her own constructed life, and its spare, affectless prose.
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Buy on AmazonRevolutionary Road
by Richard Yates
Frank and April Wheeler in suburban Connecticut, trapped in a life of beautiful images that conceals a fundamental disappointment — the American contemporary parallel to Laurence's situation, with the same cold prose and the same inability of intelligent people to escape the structures they have built.
- 2
Buy on AmazonThe Women's Room
by Marilyn French
French's novel about women in the 1950s and 1960s waking up inside their marriages — a more explicit and angrier American feminist version of the awakening that Beauvoir treats with cool irony in Les Belles Images.
- 3
Buy on AmazonThe Hours
by Michael Cunningham
Three women across three generations — each perfectly maintaining a life that does not quite fit — shares Les Belles Images' interest in the gap between the performed and the felt, between the image presented and the inner experience.
- 4
Buy on AmazonBonjour Tristesse
by Françoise Sagan
Sagan's 1954 debut — a teenage girl's summer disruption of her father's carefully maintained pleasant life — the French predecessor that Beauvoir knew, with the same flat, precise observation of bourgeois comfort under pressure.
- 5
Buy on AmazonThe Corrections
by Jonathan Franzen
A family's carefully maintained images — the good father, the good marriage, the good children — collapsing under the pressure of dementia, depression, and the financial crisis — the American novel most structurally comparable to Les Belles Images' satirical family portrait.
- 6
Buy on AmazonUne vie
by Guy de Maupassant
A woman who invested everything in an image of happiness and found it empty — Maupassant's nineteenth-century model for Beauvoir's twentieth-century critique: the beautiful image of bourgeois domesticity as a trap for women.
- 7
Buy on AmazonMrs. Dalloway
by Virginia Woolf
A day in the life of a woman who has organised her life around social performance — Clarissa Dalloway's party is the purest expression of the beautiful image as social achievement, and the novel asks the same question as Beauvoir's about what the image costs.
- 8
Buy on AmazonThe Feminine Mystique
by Betty Friedan
The sociological analysis of the same phenomenon Les Belles Images fictionalises — the depression of educated women trapped in suburban domesticity — published three years before the novel and providing the intellectual framework for understanding Laurence's situation.
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