Gregor Keuschnig, the protagonist of [A Moment of True Feeling], awakens one morning from uneasy dreams to discover that he has not been transformed into a gigantic insect. His "large and intricate" Paris apartment shows no signs of convulsion, the leaves of the trees outside his window flutter tranquilly, his wife and daughter are peacefully asleep; still, the dream—in which he murdered an old woman—has cataclysmically cracked open his life. "[He] felt as though he were bursting out of his skin and a lump of flesh lay wet and heavy on the carpet." As Keuschnig goes through the day—drudging away at his Austrian Embassy job, coupling with his mistress, feverishly wandering the streets—he lives on the edge of transformation and then, at a small dinner party, the molecules begin to dance. "[Keuschnig] felt himself to be something BLOODCURDLINGLY strange … a monstrous, unfinished bag of skin, a freak of nature. a MONSTROSITY…."

Kafka, of course. However, Keuschnig's metamorphosis never really takes place: those molecules were only jitterbugging in his imagination. Early in the novel it becomes apparent that the existential mandarins hover near, and that A Moment of True Feeling is yet another ramble down Nothingness Boulevard…. With all its Pop-violent effects … A Moment is comic-strip Sartre, with the ooze of Nausea blurring the edge of every panel.

As always, Peter Handke is concerned with the perimeters and possibilities of language. In his great play Kaspar … language is used tyrannically to control a puppet-victim who enters the world armed only with the sentence, "I want to be a person like somebody else was once." All through A Moment—as in his novels The Goalie's Anxiety at the Penalty Kick and Short Letter, Long Farewell, and the memoir A Sorrow Beyond Dreams … Handke describes the breakdown of connections with the world as a disassociation of language and consciousness. When Keuschnig first reels from the void-opening meaninglessness of his life, he tries to maintain equilibrium through "a frantic effort to think in complete sentences."

Like so many passages in A Moment, this parallels the moment in Sartre's Nausea when the narrator Roquentin, in his own existential swoon, says that "things are divorced from their names…. Alone without words, defenseless, they surround me, are beneath me, behind me, above me." Without language one becomes unmoored from reality, set adrift on Cubistic debris-strewn seas of incomprehensibility. Characteristically, Handke spikes the narrative by making language call attention to itself; capital letters blaze like neon above the busy streets of Handke's prose….

Handke has also proved that he has an operatic gift for denunciation…. The liveliest pages of A Moment are those in which Keuschnig rails all around him with the wrath of a comic Coriolanus….

Yet for all its commotion, snaking humor, slapstick, and Road Runner pacing, the book skids and scrapes along for pages upon PAGES of screeching tedium. I don't really understand what spurred Handke to undertake this novel; from the very first page it hits a tinny chord. The narrative is prefaced by a quotation from the founder of the Frankfurt School, M. Horkheimer, which asks, "Violence and inanity—are they not ultimately one and the same thing?" No, M., they are not. And as a burlesque of modernist angst (as represented in the work of Beckett, Sartre, Kafka), A Moment seems about as pertinent as a send-up of proletarian literature—why bother? Compared with the brooding, somber prose of his previous work, A Sorrow Beyond Dreams, the writing here seems artificially wired up—it has an amphetamine breathlessness.

A Moment of True Feeling is a curiously unfelt book. I don't much care for Goalie's Anxiety …, but Short Letter, Long Farewell and A Sorrow Beyond Dreams are works of a strong original intelligence, and both have autobiographical reverberations….

Though A Moment has its personal echoes—the protagonist, like Handke, is Austrian, the protagonist's doppelganger is a writer, and a dateline informs us that the novel was written in Paris—it lacks the tension, texture, and hard grain of veracity that make his other narratives so compelling. It's more of a performance than a novel, and a hoarse-voiced performance at that. Since Handke is perhaps the most influential young writer in the West today, one hopes that this is a work that needed to be spat out so that he could clear a space in his life for the next endeavor.