[In the below review of Doctor of Silence, Shostak evaluates Kelly's writing in terms of negative possibility.]

Robert Kelly's fictions can perhaps be introduced most easily in terms of what they are not: neither the spare, flat stares at ordinary life associated with minimalism, nor ripping good yarns, these works puzzle and provoke by challenging the conventions of the narrative form itself. Kelly's characters do not behave like ordinary fictional characters, who have recognizable lives (names, occupations, etc.) and who perform recognizable actions; his “fictions” are not constructed with the usual beginning, middle, and end. Enigmatic and complex, with affinities to the likes of Poe, Kafka, and Cortazar, these works ask questions, direct vision, and play with language in a way that manages, most of the time, to heighten our appreciation of their artfulness without their seeming overly contrived.

Like so many contemporary writers, Kelly—a noted poet—is extremely interested in language itself. Yet he is less dismayed by the limitations and difficulties of words than he is excited by what they can do. In “The Woman Who Had Five A's in Her Name,” for example, he expresses, with great eloquence, the thrill as well as the frustration in the act of communication. In this dense, dreamy work, a man and a woman are thinking, speaking, and making love simultaneously; thoughts merge with words and actions until they seem indistinguishable. As they work toward communication, the woman muses:

How could love be different
from that, following
language from where it
rises in me to where it
flows in the world, feeling
flowing as language be-
tween the banks that lan-
guage knows but we can
never see or guess, what are
the boundaries of language,
not what it can't tell but
what keeps it telling, keeps
it going, keeps it knowing?

Tentative and inaccurate as their words often are, the characters do arrive at some understanding: “Maybe we're walking along in your name. How do you spell you? How are we going? Is this our alphabet?. … So hand in hand through the only alphabet they took their way.”

More conventional in terms of narrative structure, “The Book and Its Contents” also deals with the theme of language—more specifically, with the nature of fiction. The book to which the title refers is the creation of the slightly sinister Dr. Perkunas, who describes it as “a book the words have written by themselves. … It says everything by itself, without our intrusion and our interferences.” Though a book writing itself with the “guidance” of the author seems a rather obvious metaphor for the creative process, Kelly handles it with admirable freshness. The spookiness of the doctor, the skepticism of the narrator, and the vibrance of the imagery engage our emotions as well as our minds.

Some of the works in Doctor of Silence are less successful than these; a few seem self-indulgent, even trite (“Dog,” for example, says nothing new about reincarnation, while “Hair,” an ambitious work set in some post-apocalyptic time and place, is just not convincing). Yet all these fictions are imbued with intelligence and a master's attention to words and all the many ways they can mean. For this, the book deserves high praise.