[In the following review, Josipovici dismisses Abish's stories as banal and vulgar exercises in “American pseudo-experimentalism.”]

“Remnants of the old atrocity subsist, but they are converted into ingenious shifts in scenery, a sort of ‘English Garden’ effect, to give the required air of naturalness, pathos and hope.” These words of John Ashbery's form the epigraph to the first story in Walter Abish's collection [In the Future Perfect]. They are menacing and haunting precisely because they are so simple, so clear. What old atrocity? we wonder, and who converts and who requires? The passage is troubling precisely because we all seem to be implicated, because it suggests that all patterning, no matter how innocent, is a way of concealing; but, by the same token, that all patterning, however innocent, carries the tell-tale signs of its origins.

Unfortunately this is by far the best thing in the book. Abish follows it, for example, with a story of awful banality, about a writer—not so different, we guess, from Abish himself—who comes to a clean new German town to interview a local author. Of course it turns out that the town is built on the site of an old concentration camp; of course the visitor's ex-wife turns out to have been in this very camp (it is even suggested, with plonking obviousness, that the visitor himself, since he does not take off his shirt when he makes love to the immediately willing daughter of—of course—the ex-camp commandant, has something on his arm he wishes to hide); of course the Germans he meets don't want to remember; of course the ex-commandant's daughter is suddenly struck with guilt or remorse and vanishes; of course her friends silently blame the visitor for disturbing their settled way of life.

The story is nothing but a string of clichés. We are never made to ponder motive or asked to grapple with the complexity of the issues involved. Malcolm Bradbury, in his enthusiastic introduction, compares Abish to Peter Handke, but to my ear they are worlds apart. Handke's neutral prose is, like Kleist's, resonant with suppressed emotion, and his books convey a sense of deep understanding and compassion, as well as a fierce delight in the one weapon left him in a terrifying world: writing itself.

Abish, by contrast, seems to want to present us with the neutrality of adult cartoons, combined with the New American Pseudo-Experimentalism. This means that he writes in short paragraphs, which often have little relation to each other; that he eschews all punctuation except the full stop; that he is fond of numbering words in order to draw our attention to their recurrence at different points in the piece, or running through the alphabet with the initial letters of the words of a paragraph. But the style never seems to be dictated, as it is in Handke or, say, Georges Perec, by the exigencies of the theme, while the formal constraints are too slack to be interesting. If, for example, in using the alphabet as generator, you leave yourself free to repeat letters as often as necessary, and even to leave some out, it is like writing a sonnet sequence with poems of anything from twelve to sixteen lines, and in any rhyme scheme, or none; one wonders why the writer has bothered with the form in the first place.

Part of the answer is that Abish is clearly uneasy with the given forms of narrative but doesn't quite know what to do about it. The result is a continuous attempt at “alienation effect”, plus an excruciating whimsy, as in the opening to the fourth story: “In the cradle of civilization men and women habitually sat face-to-face. They sat on stone benches or on the ground. The art of costume design was already well-advanced, although, I might add, these events preceded the invention of the door-knob and the windowpane.”

Yet such writing, like that of Coover or Barthelme, is highly regarded in America, where clearly both style and content find echoes in many hearts. Fiction which deals, though, only with people whose principal interests are sex, being unpleasant to their spouses or blowing people up, even if this is an authentic image of present-day America, makes for tedious reading. The attempt to inject pathos by the use of resonant epigraphs and concentration camps turns the tedious into the unpleasantly vulgar.