Les Belles Images Reading Order

Les Belles Images (Beautiful Images, 1966) is the last novel Beauvoir published and the most formally experimental of her fiction: a short, concentrated narrative about Laurence, a successful Parisian advertising executive in her mid-thirties, who begins to question whether the 'beautiful images' that her profession creates — and that structure her own carefully managed life, with its apartment, its successful architect husband, its children, its well-maintained relationships — are a form of self-deception that conceals a fundamental emptiness. The novel is Beauvoir's critique of the consumer society of the Fifth Republic — the France of the Trente Glorieuses, the thirty years of post-war prosperity — and its portrait of a woman who has, in the terms of Le Deuxième Sexe, successfully assimilated into the dominant culture's image of what a successful woman should be, and who is beginning to sense that this assimilation has cost her something essential. Laurence's crisis is triggered partly by her daughter Catherine's growing awareness of the poverty and suffering that the beautiful images conceal, and partly by her own suppressed memories and desires. The novel is written in a flat, affectless third-person style that mimics the advertising language it critiques, and which gives it a spare, cold quality quite unlike the expansive first-person of the autobiography or the social realism of Les Mandarins.