The book is the story of Adam Pollo, a 29-year-old man who, Le Clézio says, "is not sure whether he has just left the left the army or a mental home." An interrogation of the type most readers would expect from the title does not occur until the last 30 or so pages. Instead, the real interrogation is Adam's own existential questioning of and approach toward life.
He is a squatter in an empty home near the beach. He spends hours gazing out the window or lounging in deck chairs thinking and writing, usually in the form of letters to Michèle, who he considers his lover. Adam will go into town occasionally for food and cigarettes. When he does venture out of the house, he spends his time wandering the city and beach, still pondering often deeply philosophical questions in minute detail, sometimes logically and other times far more chaotically. Adam is so engaged in attempting to assess life as it is—or at least as he perceives it to be—that he doesn't want a dog to start following him because he fears "the responsibility of leadership."
In Le Clézio's hands, we experience a multi-faceted exploration of Adam's days and thoughts. The story is told in letters, diary entries, verse and even reproductions of newspaper articles of events that occur in the book. Yet language, not presentation, is also a cornerstone tool.
For example, the first two pages of chapter E (all chapters are by letter in alphabetical order rather than number) use a variety of geometry terms as a means of expression. Angles, squares, circles, parallel lines, curved lines and rectangles are all used to describe the process of finding the house in which Adam has taken up residence. Le Clézio returns to this device near the end of the novel, as Adam views the room he is in and then the world in terms of angles and design. "The world, like Adam's pyjamas, was striped with straight lines, tangents, vectors, polygons, rectangles, trapezoids of all kinds, and the network was perfect[.]"
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