Jean Echenoz: Every time we say goodbye

"I'm off" Ferrer said, 'I'm leaving you. I'm leaving everything, but I'm going'... 'All right,' said Ferrer, 'but honestly, I'll only stay a moment. Just a quick one, then I'm off.'" So starts and so ends the latest winner of the Prix Goncourt, the latest novel by Jean Echenoz. Called, inevitably, I'm Off (Harvill, £9.99) - not quite as casual as the original Je m'en vais, but as colloquial as Guido Waldman's faithful translation can get - this is the story of a man who's an expert in leaving but cannot handle parting.

"I'm off" Ferrer said, 'I'm leaving you. I'm leaving everything, but I'm going'... 'All right,' said Ferrer, 'but honestly, I'll only stay a moment. Just a quick one, then I'm off.'" So starts and so ends the latest winner of the Prix Goncourt, the latest novel by Jean Echenoz. Called, inevitably, I'm Off (Harvill, £9.99) - not quite as casual as the original Je m'en vais, but as colloquial as Guido Waldman's faithful translation can get - this is the story of a man who's an expert in leaving but cannot handle parting.

So, by repeatedly walking out on his life - on his wife, and then a succession of women; on his job, and a sequence of alternatives; on his country, to embark on a Conradian voyage of exploration - Ferrer dodges unpleasant consequences but fosters his inability to connect. Every greeting will have uncertain implications if it is destined to lead only to a goodbye.

Parallel with the tale of the feckless Ferrer runs that of his assistant Delahaye, who takes one further step in reinventing himself. He elects to exploit all he has learnt of the art-gallery world as a criminal, while Ferrer simply regards most of those with whom he has to deal as criminals already. Jean Echenoz coolly comments, "If I'd used more than 2 per cent of the material I'd gathered through interviewing gallerists, my characters would have appeared impossibly cynical, the most implausible caricatures."

Echenoz counterpoints the narrative of Ferrer's emotional crisis with Delahaye's financial one. Each is, at root, suffering a truly French crisis of identity. One seeks to resolve it on an Arctic trip in search of Inuit artefacts, and the other exports it, along with the stolen art works, across the Basque border.

Echenoz is swift to raise the question of identities: "Absolutely the one and only thing I have in common with Ferrer is my age. We are both men in our fifties, and that's all." Apart from the fact that in the course of the book Ferrer suffers a couple of heart attacks - an acute version of health scares with which the author has become familiar.

He finds giving up smoking "like trying to clamber up a greased rope with the knots removed". Echenoz has abandoned that challenge, temporarily at least, as he sits smoking fervently in a café bathed in wintry sunshine, across from the Parisian church of Saint-Sulpice - where Tobias forever wrestles with the Angel in Delacroix's most famous mural.

The prime asset Echenoz claims from the Goncourt Prize is an instant tenfold increase in his readership. It rose from a steady 30-40,000 copies for previous novels (figures many British authors would rejoice in). And he has made improvements to his apartment in the XIXe arrondissement. Demolition chaos is the ostensible reason we don't meet there, though an intense sense of privacy might well play its part.

Echenoz writes only a few hours a day and enjoys long walks across the city. He seems now to need more than to love his chosen home: "Paris doesn't change, only the outskirts do. I always spend part of the day walking in this city that I have adopted and in which I am now imprisoned. It's a love affair I can't escape from."

We know that Jean Echenoz was born in the ancient Roman city of Orange, but it appears he left there while still an infant. His twin early careers as musician and research chemist turn out to be fabrications to amuse importunate journalists.

I return to his earlier mention of a childhood spent "moving about". The cause, it emerges, was that his father was head psychiatrist in a number of hospitals and the family followed his career. Echenoz, then, grew up in a succession of psychiatric hospitals in which he claims to have been "very happy indeed". Psychiatry was his first career choice, although for pragmatic reasons he ended up a sociology graduate. That way he conserved what he was to discover was what he held dearest of all: "Reading and then writing, what I've done all my life.

"The reader I'm writing for is me because, deep down, I write what I want to read. If I stopped to consider any reader other than myself, I'd be sunk... So, while I'm delighted to be selling books and doing up my apartment, I couldn't possibly write except for myself."

The Goncourt was the latest in a succession of prizes. Such phenomenal success has perplexed as well as enchanted the critics. The Magazine Littéraire found him guilty of "trop de talent"; Le Figaro of suffering from "a surfeit of virtuosity"; Le Monde claimed he had a rare "poetic gift... in the constant tension between a mysterious, elusive reality on one hand and the words in which to give it the most meticulous expression".

L' Express found him "the literary equivalent to Jean-Luc Godard". It's true there is a filmic quality to his work, the distance between the narrator and narrative akin to that between the cinematographer and the action. It's signalled in I'm Off, when the narrator shifts quickly into a conspiratorial "we".

Echenoz has been compared to Gide, Flaubert, Nabokov and, repeatedly, that master of wordplay Raymond Queneau. Echenoz cites Faulkner and Eric Ambler among his preferred reading, adding that he is "much more European than American". Notwithstanding the fact that, after a number of visits, "India is the one place where I at once felt at home, and where I always feel comfortable. I even learnt to speak English with an Indian accent."

There, a chance article in the National Geographic caught his eye, something he later described as a "small miracle". It described a ship caught in an Arctic ice floe for the past half-century and was accompanied by a striking photograph of this human construct trapped by Nature in another time. Time is, in truth, the mediator and the winner in I'm Off - his first "geographical novel". One wonders if this label is to distinguish it from the murder mystery, the spy thriller, the international adventure and novel-he-wrote-as-a-woman (Les Grandes Blondes). No, he insists. Here time is punctuated by various categories of sleep, from making love to drug-induced unconsciousness to sudden death. It's explored through an alternation between a "land that time forgot", thousands of years old, and contemporary Paris - all urban rush, furtive encounters, fast deals.

Echenoz has a ludic tendency: he plays with time, characters and plots that all work simultaneously. This is, he says, a bulwark against boredom. "I'm in the position of author-reader and want at all costs to avoid tedium. Play exists, sure, in every definition of the term. But writing isn't just a game: the stakes are too high". The underlying desperation of such a throwaway ending is never far from the surface: "Better to laugh. Otherwise...otherwise... well, otherwise things tend to be un peu catastrophique, n'est-ce pas?" Catastrophic is a strong adjective, isn't it? "Sure, but we all need to hedge against despair." He continues the analogy: "As Pierre Michaux said, if I hadn't written, I'd have died from gambling. Me, I'd just have been extrêmement malheureux".

Swiftly, Echenoz moves on to another variation of his fugue. "Being my own first reader, I write first to seduce myself." Himself, and half a million readers. Our time is up and he's off, a small fair-haired figure across the square. Je m'en vais.