[Walter Abish in "Alphabetical Africa"] has violated all our expectations of continuity and development, flouted our trust in the created reality of fiction—but I believe he has done so for a reason. The alphabetical stammer, the lists of Swahili words, the teasing laugh with which the past behavior of the "characters" (really names with sexual organs attached) is twitched away from us and a whole new set introduced in conformity with the alphabetical disciplines … is essential to Abish's intention, his ulterior motive. He has written, I believe, a novel of erotic obsession, in which language itself has received the transferred charge of feeling.

Ideas and actions here are not developed, they are distributed; feelings are not dramatized, they are reified; the text is a kind of breviary of compulsive (and masturbatory) gratification. We call the great land masses continents because they are named after women (Africa, Asia, Europe) and we expect them to be chaste—so that men may violate their darkest interiors, I suppose.

Abish has written an infuriating book: its rhythms are those of what used to be called solitary vice, and its explorations into behavior lead nowhere at all—no Dr. Livingstone is recovered from the heart of his darkness, no perceptions are registered or extended…. His heroine is the woman Alva, the continent Africa shaped like the human heart and the female genitals (depending on your hang-ups, as Abish would say), and he is concerned, he is obsessed to possess, to violate her by this literary fetish, by these words in this order, not to be paraphrased or summarized, merely experienced.

That is the definition of a poem, and of certain psychotic states, and it is Abish's achievement to have stunted the growth of everything that the novel, even on its deathbed, has tried to lay claim to, in order to register, in order to disclose that "one single incident which keeps recurring," which is not so much an action, of course, as a passion, "erased and immobilized in a book."