Unpredictability is the key note to all [the stories in Minds Meet]. What is a reader to make of characters who wander in and out of separate stories, who take "trips" to Africa in the desert of an urban apartment, who become engaged to Hitler's daughter? What Abish wants to do is disconnect habitual associations. In the title piece we are led through a series of different variations on the theme of a message. Abish seems to want to show how quickly situations—as well as words—can be sketched, altered, and abandoned. (p. 43)

Abish sees fiction as above all an imaginative dis-association of the moments we take to be real…. As with Barthelme, Barth, Hawkes, and Coover, Abish chooses to confound everyday expectations to draw attention to his art. The subject is language and its autonomy. But more than fiddling with a sterile, artificial environment, Abish … explores how all events are mirrored in one absolute, but infinitely divisible language.

But Abish's creative language is not the language of familiar phrases and conversational ploys we call "communication". It is a pliable system of symbols and suggestions that evokes rather than relays intention. It owes more to Wittgenstein than Hume. Abish specifically styles several fictions (a more appropriate term than stories) after sculptural exhibitions by Terry Fox and Robert Smithson, and he strives to make language work in the same way as those artists' materials, suggesting nothing in themselves as inert objects but resonating with meaning as a complex of emotive keys. What has always made literature the queen of the arts is its ready-made language which only needed to be directed, heightened, to create art. The experimentalists are saying that it has been too easy. Language is too easily debased, too prone to cliche to be a pure medium of creative deployment. Literature's greatest asset is now its chief limitation. A writer can't just 'throw' common artifacts into a new 'shape'. The audience is too used to words. Abish does with words what Warhol did to pictorial expectation. Marcel Proust siding with cabbies in a wildcat strike in Albuquerque, New Mexico can be viewed as Abish's Campbell Soup Can.

Perhaps the most successful work in this always amusing—though sometimes excessively aleatory—collection is modeled after another art form, film. With "This Is Not A Film This Is A Precise Act of Disbelief", Abish hilariously parodies the films of Jean-Luc Godard, and brilliantly utilizes cinematic editing techniques to concoct a mystery story that is satisfying for both style and characterizational subtlety…. The flat, objective writing lends a menacing tone to "facts" in a typical story of small-town chicanery and scandal. Just as Godard does in a film with cliched action and crude characters, Abish's information is exposed and withheld from frame to frame; and the detached, ironical attitude of the director/author uncovers new depths in familiar circumstances…. It is a tribute to Abish's skill that words can leave as strong an impression on the mind as colored surfaces in a film can. They both impress in a mute but immediate way. By rendering words as neutral as paint or film, Abish transforms them into whatever emotionally charged surface he chooses. Images, not words or phrases, linger in the mind. Just as words on a page collide, coagulate, and finally coalesce around feelings a description can only suggest.

Such a style can face no greater test than the erotic, and here Abish's suggestive style triumphs. (pp. 44-5)

Perhaps some of the natural significatory richness of language is lost by fracturing it as if its only connection to human life were through technical facility. But by forcing it again to be mysterious, by making it literally truthful through imaginative transformation, Abish and his colleagues are setting the groundwork for a deeper general appreciation of human potential through the most wondrous of all human capabilities, language. (p. 45)