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...