PARIS — Selling in droves and inspiring acres of newsprint, the standout novel in France this publishing season is Jonathan Littell’s “Les Bienveillantes.” This sensationalistic Holocaust story, which presents itself as the confessions of a gay, incestuous, patricidal S. S. officer living incognito in rural France, is stirring up controversy as well. Of course, a little notoriety about a celebrated French novel is not unheard of, but the nationality of this particular novel’s author is. By season’s end, Jonathan Littell, a Brooklyn native and son of Cold War spy novelist Robert Littell, had walked away with the grand jury prize of the Academie Française, along with the most prestigious of all, the Prix Goncourt — only the second time in history the juries have anointed the same book.

In characteristic style, Parisian critics have greeted the book with a range of dramatic pronouncements. In the Nouvel Observateur, the writer and critic Jérôme Garcin wrote, “Never in the recent history of French literature has a debut novelist shown such ambition in his material, such mastery in his writing, such meticulousness in historical detail and such sangfroid.” In same magazine, Claude Lanzmann, the director of the Holocaust documentary “Shoa,” said the novel was useless for the reader who already knows about the Holocaust and not helpful to the reader who doesn’t. “The accumulation of all its episodes and horrors produces mental overload and an unreal effect,” he wrote.

Others are more circumspect. “I don’t think it’s a chef d’oeuvre, not at all,” Claire Devarrieux, a critic for the journal Libération, said. “Honestly, I found the first 50 pages very weak. But I continued anyway because I had to. It’s an ambitious book…parts of it are very interesting [but] I fault its originality. Where it is original is in the scope of the novel, but frankly — the homosexual degenerate Nazi — it’s not original.”

Original or not, the awarding of the Goncourt to “Les Bienveillantes” does represent a milestone, not so much for French literature as for French publishing. Mr. Littell is the first author represented by a literary agent to ever win the coveted prize, an achievement greeted with ambivalence by many.

The editorial page of Le Monde emphasized the risks taken on by Gallimard, the book’s publisher, when Mr. Littell’s agent, Andrew Nurnberg, refused to grant them international rights to the novel, contrary to the standard practice in France. “A house like Gallimard, whose prestige was built on difficult and essential authors, sees itself deprived of the formula necessary to support an ambitious editorial ethic … not good news for French publishers,” the editorial said.

At issue is the French “cultural exception,” the regulatory and financial regime that protects the French culture industry from outside competition. It protects independent bookstores from pricing pressure by limiting the discounting of books to 5% off the publisher’s price. Also protected are French publishers, who by virtue of the peculiarities of French copyright law keep their rights to a work for the life of the author plus 50 years.

Mr. Nurnberg defended the role of the literary agent, almost nonexistent in France, and criticized the French exception “which seems to confer to the editor a divine right of ownership of his authors.”

In the same paper, Antoine Gallimard, chief editor of Gallimard, stressed the gravity of the threat to the status quo. “The major risk [to French publishing ] is the restricted time period over which editors are granted rights to a work, whereas the French model grants for the duration of the intellectual property,” he said. “Today, proposals arrive on my desk granting a period of three to five years starting from the signature of the contract, before the translation has even been undertaken!”

According to Violaine Huisman, literary agent at the Charlotte Sheedy Literary Agency, Mr. Gallimard’s argument misses the mark. “The justification for the long duration of editorial ownership of rights to works was always that French editors supported authors through their entire careers,” she said. French editors have also begun jobhopping, so a writer can no longer be assured of having a long-run relationship with a publishing house. “The old joke,” Ms. Huisman said, “was that a job at a French publisher was like a job at the New Yorker. Once you got there, you never left. That’s not true today.”

In America, we will have to wait until 2008 for a translation of “Les Bienveillantes.” HarperCollins is rumored to have paid more than a million dollars for the North American rights to the book.

Mr. Treneer is a writer in Paris.