The Associated Press
Wednesday, Oct. 20, 1999; 12:17 a.m. EDT

PARIS –– Fiction writer Nathalie Sarraute, who helped developed France's "new novel" movement, died Tuesday at her Paris home. She was 99.

Sarraute was best known for her writing on imperceptible movements. It was a distinctive style that helped pave the way for the "new novel" movement, which developed in post-World War II France and revolutionized novel-writing by abandoning traditional form and content.

Sarraute's death was announced by her son-in-law, Jean-Francois Revel, a philosopher.

Sarraute turned out her first book, "Tropismes," in 1939 and wrote more than 20 works, from novels to plays to essays.

Sarraute has said that it was with her third novel, "L'ere du Soupcon" (Era of Suspicion), published in 1956, that she realized a new form of writing was emerging that tried to get at the "interior drama" of people's lives.

"Take a simple phrase like 'it's good,'" she said in an interview aired on French television. "It is the tone in which it is said that makes people look to the depths of their conscience."

French President Jacques Chirac hailed Sarraute as "one of the greatest writers of this century," and Prime Minister Lionel Jospin called her a "major writer" who "honored the French language."

Born July 18, 1900, in Ivanovo, Russia, to Jewish parents, Sarraute came to Paris with her mother at the age of 2. She returned to Russia as a child before coming back to France to make her home.

In German-occupied France during World War II, Sarraute at one point took in writer Samuel Beckett and his wife, who had been denounced to the Gestapo. Beckett would later join Sarraute in the "new novel" movement, which also included Michel Butor, Nobel prize winner Claude Simon and Alain Robbe-Grillet.

Funeral arrangements were not immediately known.