La Maison de rendez-vous Reading Order

La Maison de rendez-vous (The House of Assignation, 1965) by Alain Robbe-Grillet is the novel in which the Nouveau Roman method was pushed toward something closer to postmodern fiction — a work set in Hong Kong (or a fictional version of Hong Kong) that freely mixes narrative strands, repeats scenes with variations, and makes no pretence of offering a coherent narrative. A series of scenes — a party at the villa of Lady Ava, an exotic dance performance, a crime or crimes, the sale of a woman to an unnamed buyer, a pursuit through the streets — recur in different combinations, with different details, told by narrators who may or may not be consistent. The atmosphere is that of a B-movie thriller set in an Orientalist Hong Kong that is explicitly a fantasy of Western projection rather than any actual place, and Robbe-Grillet is partly satirising the conventions of the colonial adventure novel while using them. La Maison de rendez-vous is less focused and more playful than the earlier novels — it anticipates the 'new new novel' (nouveau nouveau roman) of Robbe-Grillet's later career — and it is the best entry point for readers interested in the direction Robbe-Grillet's work took after the formal purism of La Jalousie.