Modiano’s driving compulsion is the need to know—to dig up information long concealed or lost. If that urge has obvious moral implications when applied to France’s murky memory of its wartime complicity, it is born from an impulse more primal than the ethical one. “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,” says the narrator of “Ring Roads,” his third novel. (A muted first person is Modiano’s standard fictional uniform.) The shadows in question are a group of rotten war profiteers, shown in mottled, impassive closeup. There’s the blackmailing newspaperman desperately afraid of going broke; the high-riding coquette who got her start as a girl rented out to passengers on overnight trains; the brutish legionnaire, a black marketeer and Jew-hater, who is imagined on his return to Paris after his posting in Morocco: “He was terrified of crossing the street, and in a blind panic on the Place de l’Opéra, asked a policeman to take his hand and lead him across.” That flash of human frailty gives weight to the novelist’s beautiful lie—that he is reporting on people who exist beyond the boundaries of his invention.

As he slowly pieced together the story of Dora Bruder, Modiano took a shortcut through fiction and wrote “Honeymoon,” designating the character of Ingrid as Dora’s double. His own stand-in, Jean, is an “explorer,” a maker of documentaries about exotic places. Instead of going to Brazil to shoot his next film, he hides from his wife at a cheap hotel to contemplate more ephemeral quarry. In the sixties, as a young drifter, Jean had met a couple, Rigaud and Ingrid, who lived modestly on the Riviera. He was drawn to their generosity, and to Ingrid’s cryptic insouciance. At night, as neighbors approached the house to invite them to a party, she and Rigaud turned off all the lights. “ ‘We’ll pretend to be dead,’ ” she had explained. “ ‘There are moments when we are incapable of exchanging a single word with anybody . . . . ’ ”

An impenetrable world is hidden in that ellipsis. Some years later, Jean learned that Ingrid had committed suicide; the puzzle of her life has come to obsess him. The matter of memory is organized, by the whim of association, into its own private sequences, and “Honeymoon,” smoothly translated by Barbara Wright, follows the same logic, opening with Jean’s discovery of Ingrid’s death and weaving back and forth through time to lead up to his speculation of what might have happened to her during the war—the root, he suspects, of her attraction to disappearance. He pictures her tightrope-like walk along the border of the Ninth Arrondissement, and her panic when she realizes that she can’t go home. In a café, a young man in a threadbare jacket smiles at her: Rigaud. They are bound in an instant by instinctive trust. Ingrid is vulnerable as both a minor and a Jew, and so they go into hiding—their “honeymoon”—in a Mediterranean beach town. Before she leaves Paris, she slips back to the Boulevard Ornano to see her father. He put an ad in the newspaper to find her, she learns: Ingrid Teyrsen, sixteen, a bit over five feet tall, “oval face, grey eyes.” Then he was taken by the police.

This is a triply layered fiction. Modiano imagines Jean, Jean imagines Ingrid, and, through Ingrid, Modiano tries to glimpse what he can of Dora—“a place where she had been, a detail of her life.” Turning to invention to get at deeper realities of experience is fiction’s righteous mission, and “Honeymoon” performs it beautifully. But truthfulness isn’t the same as the truth. Why had Dora run away? She had a rebellious nature, Modiano learned from her cousin. As for life at school, he could imagine that himself: the sinister nuns, the tedious prayers, the oppressive silence. But he kept returning to the question of where Dora had gone when she left, and how she had spent her time.

Modiano staged his own escape from boarding school at the age of fourteen. He had lived away from home since he was a child, not because his parents wanted to protect him but because they didn’t care enough to try. “I’m a dog who pretends to have a pedigree,” he announces in “Pedigree,” his memoir of his early life, published in France when he was nearly sixty. His mother was (in Mark Polizzotti’s lucid translation) “a pretty girl with an arid heart”: Louisa Colpeyn, a Flemish actress who came to Paris during the war to work for a German-controlled film-production company and settled into a career of bit parts, travelling with the theatre and neglecting her sons. When Patrick was six and Rudy, his brother, four, she sent them to live with a friend in Jouy-en-Josas, a town on the outskirts of Paris. “Strange women came and went,” Modiano recalls, women who wore men’s clothes and drove American cars and worked in night clubs. The stay came to an abrupt end when the friend was arrested for burglary. There was never any money, and Louisa leaned relentlessly on Patrick for support. At twenty-four, still susceptible to her demands, he went with her to hock a gold pen presented to him at a literary-awards ceremony: “They gave me only two hundred francs for it, which my mother pocketed, steely-eyed.”

“I’m just saying, maybe we wouldn’t need the swords if we didn’t wear these clothes.” Facebook

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Modiano’s parents had met during the war and separated shortly after it ended. Alberto Modiano grew up in Paris; on his paternal side, he came from a Jewish family with roots in Tuscany. (His mother was French.) During the Occupation, he traded on the black market under a variety of aliases, doing business with people mixed up with the Gestapo. Collaboration, in Alberto’s case, was an ironic necessity: he hadn’t registered himself as a Jew, or as anything else, and, while his lack of legal identity helped to shield him from deportation, it also barred him from legitimate work. He had circulated in the criminal underworld since he was in his teens, and spent his life conducting a tangle of unprofitable business dealings with a band of shady associates, thugs and thieves who presented themselves as if ready-made for his son’s fiction.

Alberto was hardly a warmer parent than Louisa. In one harrowing episode, Patrick, fourteen years old and stranded alone in London, desperately collect-calls Alberto, “who wishes me good luck, in an indifferent voice.” The cruelty seems all the greater considering that Alberto, by then, had only one child; Rudy had died at the age of nine, a loss that devastated Patrick. But where Modiano hardens his heart against his selfish mother, he is preoccupied with the riddle of his father. He senses that Alberto’s quest for wealth and status was rooted in the Occupation: “He never told me what he had felt, deep inside, in Paris during that period. Fear? The strange sensation of being hunted simply because someone had classified him as a specific type of prey, when he himself didn’t really know what he was?”

In the spring of 1965, Louisa, “foaming at the mouth,” sent Patrick to Alberto’s apartment to collect a child-support payment he owed her. Alberto slammed the door in his son’s face; his shrewish girlfriend called the police. Together, father and son were taken to the station in a caged van so that Alberto could press charges against the “hooligan.”

The trip was a perverse reprise of one that Alberto had made in February of 1942, when he was picked up during a sweep by the Jewish Affairs police, a terrifyingly close call. If Alberto made the connection, he said nothing, an especially keen injustice, Modiano felt, since “I had embarked on a book—my first—in which, putting myself in his shoes, I relived his feelings of distress during the Occupation.” While Alberto turned to the law to sever himself from Patrick, Patrick turned to literature to make common cause with Alberto: “I wanted my first book to be a riposte to all those who, by insulting my father, had wounded me. And, on the terrain of French prose, to silence them once and for all.”