Walter Abish's fictions are hard to remember. One remembers the experience of them because they usually provoke feelings they do not resolve. But if someone asks what they are "about," it is not easy to say. Abish has been developing a style, or a writing process, that identifies a story with the telling of it as closely as possible. There is no synopsizing his recent stories because they enforce the sense that their construction is their narrative substance, that other words would not be another telling of the story, but another story.

The emphasis Abish puts on the constructed aspect of fiction is a rebuke to our worst habits of reading. We read to escape, to forget the present, to visualize, or to kill time. Abish's fiction, especially his most recent work, simply doesn't lend itself to these solipsistic urges, though it keeps us in mind of their temptation. The subversion of "realism" is only the beginning of his achievement. His writing demands that we know the meanderings of our attention as we read, that our reading be a deliberate activity, as tied to the present as the act of looking at something. The demands of Abish's fiction reflect a view of language with definite ethical implications. One aspect of this view is the notion that we know ourselves, as others know us, by the way we use language. On this view, reading, no less than speaking or thinking, is a use of language, and therefore might reveal us to ourselves no less profitably than acts of speech or thought. This notion upsets the conventional belief that introspection is the privileged path to self-knowledge. Abish's work forces us to consider the possibility that reading, done with the right sort of deliberation, might serve the purposes of self-knowledge better than the solitariness of introspection. For reading, unlike introspection, can make us consider the sense in which words we understand and use are "ours." But making such considerations central to the process of reading, Abish's fiction challenges the popular idea of our best access to ourselves as well as the popular idea of selfhood and its indebtedness to the literary concept of character.

Something that recurs in Abish's work, that sometimes seems to comprise his work, is a contention in the writing itself between linguistic incidents and fictive or narrative ones. Again and again the perception of words as the material of construction interferes with one's attempt to see the prose in terms of larger conventional components, such as character, theme, and plot. One effect of this experience is to make us realize the extent to which the rudiments of literary convention have become internal to us, that they may even be what we read with, features of our perception itself…. The style of reading his fiction recommends is one that makes us aware continually of the constructed nature of prose as the basis of the pleasures and values of reading. This manner of reading is the counterpart to a particular achievement of self-knowledge, namely, the capacity to know and tolerate the linguistic reality of one's own words. By this I mean the capacity both to know one's beliefs and to know that they are beliefs without feeling them vitiated by this awareness. To know the linguistic reality of one's own words is to be fully aware of one's responsibility for them. Abish forces us to be responsible readers by making us confront continually the linguistic reality of what we read.

These remarks might suggest that Abish's work is didactic. It is not. It does have a peculiar rigor, though, in that it requires our sustained attention. There is no better example of this rigor than Abish's extraordinary novel, Alphabetical Africa. In the novel, more than in any of his other writings, what happens is the writing itself. (pp. 48-50)

The decisions that comprise the writing obey no submerged design, no unstated psychological or political concept. For part of the process of reading the novel is sensing the ease or difficulty with which particular words or lines must have occurred to the author as means of solving the problems posed by its alphabetical structure. The book is arid of plot, characterization, and atmosphere, of everything that does not figure directly in the experience of writing and reading. At the same time it is lush with humor and linguistic incidents. (p. 50)

Often the text pretends to the tone and idiom of a journal. (Diaries and dictionaries are mentioned frequently, being ironic counterparts to the novel itself.) The writing in the early and late chapters has a telegrammatic sparseness, and something of the quality of mnemonic jottings….

Alphabetical Africa is a book preoccupied with itself. It is full of acknowledgments of its own form and the process that produced it. (p. 51)

[It] is surely the most entertaining and consistently ingenious phenomenology of the English language that anyone has written. For the book is about what it means to possess the English language, to have its words as one's own. (p. 53)