Modiano may be both serious and playful, but above all he is popular. His novels sell extremely well: they are always on the best-seller lists when they first appear, and even his older works display staying power on the market. What are the reasons for this popularity, structurally and ‘socially’ speaking? Is there a certain novelistic genre or structure related to popularity? What is the social status of that kind of novel?

PARODYING THE ‘MODIANO NOVEL’

In our discussion of how Modiano's novels subvert the conventions of detective fiction, we discovered that they themselves display a marked uniformity of style and theme, their own set of conventions. The three structural aspects of voice, order, and mood are consistent throughout his oeuvre, as are certain favourite themes. This combination of thematic and structural convention is to be found in all of Modiano's novels, and gives rise to the familiar narrative set-up of Modiano's first-person narrator-detective leading us into a search for something in his own past.

This basic skeleton of the Modiano narrative is fleshed out by various recurring details, ‘une série de traits que l'observateur avait pu noter, à la fois épars et récurrents, au fil des oeuvres déjà nombreuses publiées par l'auteur’. We have already noted the similarity between the narrator figures: they are tall, dark, shy young men with a bizarre gift for eliciting confidences, often aspiring to write, and have spent a part of their youth in Vienna. If they smoke, they have a predilection for Cravens, or other ‘cigarettes anglaises’ (Dimanches d'aoû t, Voyage de noces): they believe Switzerland to be a haven from history and time, and Rome, the end to time (Fleurs de ruine, Quartier perdu, Un Cirque passe). The novels tend to be set in similar areas of Paris: the XVIth is a favourite, as are the city's outskirts.