The Exile brings the old world of decadence, corruption, and infinite cynicism into direct juxtaposition with William Kotzwinkle's new world of comic absurdity so that "past and present collide; fascist Germany and contemporary Los Angeles interpenetrate."

The problem that Kotzwinkle had to solve was how to join his continuously evolving comic vision of an absurd urban society— the Los Angeles of the spaced-out 1980's—to his sinister sense of Berlin as the symbolic city of death.

The linkage between Los Angeles and Berlin is developed further by Kotzwinkle's mordant satire of the film industry (which he calls "accurate reporting") and by his exceptionally vivid evocation of the atmosphere of wartime Germany, a familiar subject that is pictured in the novel with an intensity and clarity that exposes the horror and terror anew.