[In the following review, Doreski praises Abish's experimental artifice in constructing narratives from previously used sentences in 99: The New Meaning.]

Walter Abish's new book [99: The New Meaning] invokes the convention of the pensée, the isolated, reified “thought,” to underscore the tendency of all fine or literary writing to privilege the sentence or paragraph and thus undermine the author's intention of rendering cohesive larger entities—short stories or novels. His procedure is to select and arrange fragments of narrative from various authors—ninety-nine of them in the title piece, fifty in “What Else,” and so on—and by juxtaposing these fragments create oddly shifting dramas of emotional introspection. The results suggest novels like Nausea composed of fictional diary or journal entries in which rhetorical discontinuity embodies strain or anxiety.

Abish, somewhat disingenuously, claims an emotional rather than an aesthetic or critical purpose: “In using selected segments of published texts authored by others as the exclusive ‘ready made’ material for these five ‘explorations’ I wanted to probe certain familiar emotional configurations afresh, and arrive at an emotional content that is not mine by design.” Yet the strategies of design, the empowerment of context over content, dominates the book. Abish, after all, has not written (in the ordinary sense) the content: he has merely appropriated it. But in juxtaposing one passage to another, utterly foreign one, he externally redetermines the emotional and aesthetic significance of that content. He shows us that fiction is dependent not only on the content of sentences and paragraphs but on their relationship to each other, or to whatever context we find them in. This both rebukes the critical establishment, with its tendency to isolate passages for examination, thus depriving them of context, and affirms some of its recent insights into the complexity of structure and texture.

In “What Else” most of the excerpts are paragraph-length, while in “Inside Out” most are sentence-length. The other three pieces mix excerpts of varied length, some as brief as four words, some containing more than a hundred words. The longest excerpts stand almost as complete essays, rather than as little stories or parables, while the short ones most resemble the pensée, the convention that gives the book its air of critical meditation. Many of them, long and short, comment on writing itself, or the situation of the writer, such as this one from “What Else”:

88

Here is a whole nervous breakdown in miniature. We came on Tuesday. Sank into a chair, could scarcely rise; every thing insipid; tasteless, colorless. Enormous desire for rest. Wednesday—only wish to be alone in the open air. Air delicious—avoided speech; could not be read. Thought of my own power of writing with veneration, as of something incredible, belonging to someone else never again to be annoyed by one. Mind a blank. Slept in my chair. Thursday. No pleasure in life whatsoever; but felt perhaps more attuned to existence.

This passage (I don't know from which author's work it derives) exemplifies certain qualities that attract Abish in his compilation: the diary motif, the air of discontinuity, the speaker's uncertainty and lack of purpose, and the fragmentary style. From a thematic view, the entire series of “found” pensées suggests a “whole nervous breakdown in miniature.” The real challenge, however, is not thematic but structural. Abish requires the reader to suspend the conventional idea of fiction as continuous narrative, to suspend as well the ordinary notions of creativity, and to confront the challenge of the text as endlessly manipulable object rather than inviolable whole. Other authors, from Joyce through Beckett to our own time, have asked something of the sort, but Abish, with a panache already familiar to admirers of his earlier work (especially the brilliant How German Is It), pushes the boundaries of fiction still further, challenging settled notions of language and structure and redefining the generic possibilities of his art.