It was written as a French textbook with California State University, Dominguez Hills professor Yvone Lenard using a process of grammatical progression.

The work was first released in the United States with the title Le Rendez-vous (The Meeting) with Robbe-Grillet and Lenard as co-authors.

The same year, Robbe-Grillet re-released the text, removing the questions and adding a prologue and an epilogue to frame the story.

A year later, the novel was translated into English by Lenard and Walter Wells, also of California State University, Dominguez Hills.

It tells the story of Simon Lecoeur, a thirty-year-old man, who allies himself with an American woman named Jean (Djinn) to act as a counteragent to technology.

The plot of Djinn is surrounded by a frame story, a technique that Robbe-Grillet also employed in his novel Dans le Labyrinthe (1959).

The police search the home of the narrator, supposed to be Simon Lecoeur, and find the manuscript lying on the desk.

Simon Lecoeur has been reported missing for several days, so the authorities break into his apartment where they find a manuscript lying on the table.

The narrator, responding to a newspaper ad, goes to a deserted industrial park to meet his potential boss, Jean.

The narrator assumes that Jean is a man and sees him at the end of a building dressed in a coat, hat, and dark glasses.

He leaves and takes the short cut, which leads him through the Rue Vercingetorix III, a street name that cannot possibly exist.

The narrator (who is finally revealed as Simon Lecoeur) wakes up and has no memory of what has happened, other than he knows he met with Djinn/Jean and needs to go to the Gare du Nord.

Realizing that they will miss the train from Amsterdam, the two start running, and Simon trips and falls on the boy, who looks as though he were dead.

She and the other man Simon begin a friendly game where she pretends that she is the employer; and she makes up a story about an anti-industrial terrorist organization as a joke.

In the background, the narrator notices the sinister cab driver as well as a blind man being led by a young boy.

She goes there and sees a man standing at the end of the corridor wearing a coat, a hat, and dark glasses...

For example, young Marie specifically asks Simon Lecoeur to tell her a story using the historical past tense.

The fact that Djinn/Jean is American also creates opportunities to point out cultural differences that exist between the English and French languages.