Alain Robbe-Grillet, a “new novelist” and filmmaker who rejected conventional storytelling and was one of France’s most important avant-garde writers, died yesterday at a Caen, France, hospital. He was 85.

Robbe-Grillet wrote the screenplays for such films as “Last Year at Marienbad” (1961) with Alain Resnais, and directed “L’Immortelle” (The Immortal) (1963), “Trans-Europ-Express” (1967) and “Eden and After” (1970).

He was the most prominent of France’s “new novelists,” a group that emerged in the mid-1950s and whose experimental works tossed aside traditional literary conventions like plot and character development, narrative and chronology, chapters and punctuation. Others included Claude Simon, Michel Butor and Nathalie Sarraute.

Robbe-Grillet was inducted into France’s Legion of Honor, and was one of the 40 so-called “immortals” of the prestigious Academie Francaise, the anointed protector of the French language.

In place of plot and character, Robbe-Grillet focused on meticulous descriptions of things and events as seen by an objective eye. With their timetables of people coming and going, Robbe-Grillet’s novels sometimes resembled noir detective stories.

His 1953 novel, “Les Gommes” (“The Erasers”), addresses a murder committed by the man who’s investigating the crime. “Le Voyeur” of 1955 describes a stranger who kills a young girl. Two years later, Robbe-Grillet published “La Jalousie” (“Jealousy”), in which a jealous husband spies on his wife and her suspected lover through the shutters of a blind, or “jalousie.” Time and again, his work explored the relationship between objectivity and subjectivity.

In 1963, he wrote “Pour Un Nouveau Roman,” (Toward a New Novel) a highly touted critical essay laying the theoretical foundations of the “new novel.” The work became the French avant-garde’s bible, and catapulted Robbe-Grillet to star status among Parisian Left Bank intellectuals.

Robbe-Grillet was born in the western town of Brest, the son of an engineer. He graduated from the prestigious Lycee Saint-Louis in Paris and received a degree in agricultural engineering from the National Agronomy Institute.

President Nicolas Sarkozy’s office described Robbe-Grillet as “equally at ease in the expression of his most intimate fantasies as in the lucid and dispassionate analysis of concepts.”

“The Academie Francaise today loses one of its most illustrious members, and without a doubt its most rebellious,” his office said in a statement.