The Move

This Georges Simenon novel, from late in his career (1967), has a smutty feel to it. It hides what it believes to be dirty behind what amounts to a wall with a peep hole. It is the story of a man in his 30s who moves with his wife and teenage son out of Paris to a new housing development. In his bedroom, while his wife is sleeping, he hears through the wall the sexual exploits of a couple in the next apartment. This topples him off his perch of middle class respectability, into a downward spiral that eventually brings him to question the very value of societal norms. Halfway through this brisk, 148-page novel, I read a People magazine piece from 1980 in which Simenon claimed to have slept with 10,000 women. That made this novel a little easier to understand, though no pleasanter.