["The English Garden," the first story in Walter Abish's collection "In The Future Perfect,"] is a brilliant flirtation with several complex issues. While it does not resolve these issues—which may not be the business of fiction—it does make them powerfully and suggestively felt.

In "Ardor/Awe/Atrocity," Mannix, the hero of an actual private eye series on television, serves as a metaphor for the fictitious excitement, the violent sensationalism, the fundamental illicitness of life in California. The story is less well-structured than "The English Garden" and not nearly as successful. It stands midway between that first brilliant effort and the relatively aimless posturing of the other five pieces in the book. (pp. 14, 75)

The more "experimental" stories in the present book do not, unfortunately, sound like one-of-a-kind achievements. They strongly resemble quite a few other experimental stories.

Since ordinary reality seems inexhaustible, one might suppose that there...