Can narrative be truly self-referential? Is it possible for a novelist, burdened with the conceptual weight of words and doubly hampered by the sequential order of story, to be as much an abstract expressionist as the painter or the musical composer, whose daubs of paint or notes of sound need not refer to anything other than themselves? One way is to treat the materials of fiction as objects in themselves—not as familiar cues to the reader (which trigger conventional responses and so set formulaic narratives to action) but rather as semiotic integers within the syntax of human behavior. This has been precisely the method Walter Abish has pursued through four books of fiction. (p. 416)

Walter Abish has been showing how the supposed realities of life (the stuff of conventionally realistic, mimetic fiction) are made of purely surface phenomena (the signs of semiologists). Because of this disposition, Abish...