[Within In the Future Perfect] there is a piece entitled, meaningfully enough, "In So Many Words". This story, hardly a story, a fragmentary depiction of a woman, her New York apartment, her environment, her routine, and her emotionless sex life, is rendered in a series of paragraphs, recounted with a dead-pan neutrality of tone which Abish often employs in his stories. But before each paragraph, we find an alphabetic reordering of most (not all) of the words to come in the following grammatically conventional, paragraph. An example:

40

a absolutely and at America American building certain convulsed croissant delicious eighth elongated floor four from height her in intended irony is it Lee munching no of one perfection perspective quite Sara she splendor standing taking the true windows with

48

Standing at one of the elongated windows, munching a Sara Lee croissant (quite delicious) she is taking in the American perfection the American splendor—absolutely no irony intended. It is true. From a certain height and perspective, the eighth floor of her building, America is convulsed with perfection.

The alphabetization of narrative of descriptive sequence achieves effects not unlike Burroughs' Cut-ups—both being extensions of the sort of games with words played by the Surrealists and Da-Daists. The new juxtapositions of words can yield unsuspected pseudo-semantic effects which can be funny, surprising, suggestive—or pointless. It is hit or miss, hit and miss—aleatory. The numbers in the quotation, incidentally, refer precisely to the number of words in the paragraph which follows—there are just so many words.

The other stories in the book do not indulge in so much lexical play, though there is a spareness and economy in the assembling of the stories—nearly all in short paragraphs with eloquent spaces in between—which seems to convey an almost constant vigilant irony over words, so that even the most innocent looking phrase seems to be placed with a certain pointed carefulness, making us aware that, in fact, there are no innocent phrases. "The English Garden" is a fairly straightforward account of an American writer's visit to a new-town in Germany which has been built on the site of an old concentration camp. The effects to be derived from this bit of dark archaeological irony could be all too obvious, but Abish is so in control of the tone that the easy irony is bypassed for the more oblique, more disturbing one. The writer arrives with a "coloring book", full of the outlines of things and people, but without the individuating colours of life. In the plastic-perfect German new-town there are outlines and things, but no life. It is, as it were, a city built on death, and despite the immaculate concealment of all traces of that gruesome, unspeakable (and therefore ever-to-be-gainsaid-or-disavowed) foundation, there are death and negation in all the glittering appliances and things and people-things of the new-town. (p. 68)

The only "event" in the story is the disappearance of a girl whose father had been a commander of the concentration camp. She is just found "missing" one day. "I look up the German word for missing. It is abwesend or fehlend or nicht zu finden. I also look up the word disappear. It is verschwinden." The words are still in the dictionary but meanwhile people disappear….

Abish extends his apparently neutral, actually highly subversive, account of the contemporary environment to … the career of a girl who runs away to find success, satisfaction, and finally death in Southern California. This story, entitled "ARDOR/AWE/ATROCITY", is also alphabetized in a different way. Every section is headed by an alliterative triad of words—so we move on to "BOUYANT/BOB/BODY" through "PLEASURE/PUNISH/POSITION" and "UNBOTTONED/UNDERWEAR/UNDERTAKES", finally to "ZOO/ZODIAC/ZERO". (Words are also numbered as to when they appear—e.g. "sign⁵⁷" which doesn't do much for me, one way or the other). One overall effect of these lexical devices is that by making language and ordering devices unusually prominent (what used to be called "foregrounding") the contents of the story become in some way less prominent; or in current terms, as the signifier is made more visibly dominant, the signified tends to recede, to diminish in "significance": hence the somewhat unreal feeling to many of the stories, often entirely appropriate to their subject matter. (p. 69)

[It] should be made clear that Abish has his own way of deconstructing conventional narrative modes and, at the same time, getting something distinctly said about life, consciousness, and word, in contemporary America. (p. 70)