Quant au riche avenir, NDiaye's first published novel, appeared in 1985, when she was aged just seventeen. One assumes that she could have been no more than fifteen or sixteen when she began to write it. ‘Ce n’était pas le premier texte écrit, très loin de là’, she states. ‘C’était la énième. Mais c’était le premier que j'imaginais montrable en tout cas’ (Asibong and Jordan, 2009: 190). When one actually reads the novel and remembers the age of the person who wrote it, the experience is quite unsettling. There is something uncanny about the maturity of the psychological analysis it contains, reading as it does like the work of an old person who has been worn out by the world, and who is now focused wholly on the construction of the perfect sentence that will encapsulate her disillusionment. Add to this precocious lucidity the fact that NDiaye would go on five years later to publish a fourth novel as contemptuous, baroque and genuinely revolutionary (in terms of its implications about the functioning of racialization in contemporary Europe) as En famille (1990), and it begins to feel appropriate to think about NDiaye in the same kinds of prodigious terms as Rimbaud, Radiguet or Anne Frank. It would appear that she herself had, from the outset, conceived of herself as someone destined to be exceptional:

The first three novels – Quant au riche avenir (1985), Comédie classique (1987) and La Femme changée en bûche (1989) – can, in many ways, be viewed as spectacularly agile performances by a brilliant and extremely young woman determined to prove, via the medium of literature, that she can, as the key protagonist Fanny will put it, ‘tout faire’ (EF, 72).