I think I see what Matt Cohen was getting at in Korsoniloff: the farcical-pathetic adventures of a displaced intellectual backed up by a series of philosophic comments on the nature of personality…. I have to be old-fashioned again and cry that nothing keeps a reader interested like character and action, and that his man Korsoniloff is not drawn nearly dense enough to interest, nor is his philosophy especially grounded in his being. Thoughty novels succeed when the character is indistinguishable from his ideology: Ivan Karamozov, Adrian Leverkuhn (Dr. Faustus), Moses Herzog. No one expects Cohen to be in that league, but he must learn that making the thought of one person interesting to a reader is about the hardest thing to accomplish in writing, and that very few have done so. (p. 63)