This not mattering — this childhood lived in a state of neglect — animates “Pedigree.” Modiano’s memoir contests his would-be erasure in the hopes, perhaps, of neutralizing a past that has made of him “a mutt with no pedigree that has too often been left on its own.” Meanwhile, the opacity of his childhood mirrors the impenetrability of France’s wartime past. Modiano’s birth coincided with the end of World War II and the beginning of France’s efforts to reckon with (and largely suppress) its complicity in the Holocaust. And this correspondence is the very foundation of his work. Modiano’s narratives stage the past as a series of mysteries and invite his readers to follow clues with him. But there will be no answers. The more he, his characters, his readers attempt to put the ­pieces together, the more fragmented the big picture ­becomes. The “facts” obscure as much as they reveal. Things happen only insofar as they have been witnessed and acknowledged, but shame provides great motive for forgetting. And so, in relating the “coldness and hostility,” the “insensitivity and heartlessness” of his mother and the “murky, clandestine” figure of his father, Modiano makes a point to implicate the world that made them. He conjures, if obliquely, the national past that was backdrop to his individual trauma.

This national-cum-personal history is at the heart of every one of Modiano’s works of fiction, and is particularly explicit in his first three novels. Released together in English translation as “The Occupation Trilogy,” these works confront the Gaullist publicity machine of a postwar France anxious to keep its Vichy skeletons in the closet. The first of the three, the satire “La Place de l’Étoile,” published in the pivotal year of 1968, paints an unsparing historical portrait of French anti-Semitism. The title itself announces that this history game will be played with sleeves rolled back and teeth bared, as it alludes both to the physical site of the Arc de Triomphe, the Parisian monument to France’s military prowess, and to the embodied site of France’s collaboration — that is, the place on the torso where Jews under the Occupation were ordered to wear the Star of David. Told from the perspective of Raphaël Schlemilovitch, a hedonistic, self-loathing Jewish dilettante of Rabelaisian proportions, the narrative moves wildly through a collage of hallucinatory scenes, each more violent and absurd than the next. The vulgarly anti-Semitic Schlemilovitch, who very well may be a paranoid schizophrenic, is unabashed in his racism and perversity: “Yes, through my millions and my orgies, I personally preside over the International Jewish Conspiracy. Yes the Second World War was directly triggered by me. Yes, I am a sort of Bluebeard, a cannibal who feeds on Aryan girls though only after raping them. Yes, I dream of bankrupting the entire French peasantry and Jewifying the region of Cantal.” Outraged and outrageous, Schlemilovitch is firm in his “resolve to become a Jewish collaborator.” His “if you can’t beat ’em . . .” attitude affords him wide berth as to the literal and philosophical company he keeps. From openly fascist and collaborationist wartime writers and politicians to the anti-Semitic Everymen of France’s traditional Catholic provinces, the Republic is endlessly corrupt and corrupting. Given this, can Schlemilovitch truly be blamed for his depravity?

“The Night Watch” and “Ring Roads,” published in 1969 and 1972, respectively, offer a relative stylistic calm after the storm of Modiano’s debut. Following on the conceit of “La Place de l’Étoile,” the idea that history makes the man (and not so much the other way around), these two novels approach the subject of France’s “behavior” during the Holocaust far less directly. In place of the monstrously debauched madman of the earlier novel, the narrators of these books exist on a human scale. In “The Night Watch,” the protagonist is a model of tortured ambivalence. Peripheral associate to a band of pimps, murderers, bookies and black marketeers, all collaborators with the French Gestapo, he infiltrates a Parisian resistance cell and begins life as a double agent, torn between a perverse loyalty to two father figures — the ruthless head gangster he calls the Khedive, and the noble resistance leader he calls the Lieutenant. As he sinks deeper and deeper into these opposing camps, he comes to understand that the morality of his actions — any of their actions — has no bearing in those “troubling and unsettling times.” The very context of Occupied Paris forecloses the possibility of ethical absolutes. “I didn’t worry much about the fate of the world. Nor was I particularly concerned about my own fate,” he admits. “I, too, after my endless rounds, my countless comings and goings, would finally melt into the shadows. Without ever knowing what it was all about.” Neither hero nor villain, he is a product of his time and place, a quiet testament to France’s collective unwillingness to fight.

“Ring Roads” reprises this climate of apathy and disillusionment, parodying and further condemning the shameless opportunists who thrive in the shameful world of Vichy Paris. The novel’s first-person narrator is yet another lost boy, mixed up with yet another band of thugs — this time in hopes of forging a bond with one of the gang’s members: the father who tried to push him in front of a train 10 years earlier and subsequently disappeared. Not unlike Modiano in “Pedigree,” this solitary young man confesses that his determination to uncover the lives of criminals and other misfits may seem purposeless: “I know the life stories of these shadows is of no great interest to anyone, but if I didn’t write it down, no one else would do it. It is my duty, since I knew them, to drag them — if only for an instant — from the darkness. It is a duty, but for me it is also a necessary thing.” But the air of weary obligation belies the desperation of this character’s effort to gain some purchase on his own existence. What compels him to write is the process of piecing together a few scraps of life to figure out why he matters.

Following a trail of historical detritus to confront an unburied past is the task Modiano sets for his characters in the “detective” stories “After the Circus” (1992), “Paris Nocturne” (2003) and “So You Don’t Get Lost in the Neighborhood” (2014). All three take place in the spatial and temporal interstices created by uncertain memory and carefully guarded secrets. All three turn on their protagonists’ efforts to save or be saved by a fragile and mysterious woman, and all three have a neglected or otherwise wounded child at their core. In the surrealist love story “After the Circus,” an untethered young man falls for a skittish, slightly older woman he first meets after a police interrogation. In following his mysterious new love through the streets of mid-’60s Paris and its environs, he comes to know the perils inherent in any attempt “to gather up the scattered pieces of a life,” especially a life lived in the shadows. Similarly, “Paris Nocturne” begins with a chance meeting that changes everything, undoing the past-ness of the past and so reconfiguring the present. The unnamed narrator has been hit by a car, driven by a woman who eventually disappears without a trace. Bit by bit, the narrative reveals the overlapping layers of a story rooted in his childhood, at the center of which is an incident that oddly parallels the events surrounding the accident. Literally and emotionally upended by this violent encounter, and thanks largely to the ambivalent effect of the ether administered to him at the hospital — “Ether made me both remember and forget” — the narrator embarks on a quest. Shocked out of his inertia, he begins haltingly to bring into focus the life “without a landscape” he has led up to that moment. In the end, more than the mysterious woman it is the idea of coherence he pursues — “a fixed point, something reassuring, a landscape even, that would help me to regain my footing.”