SOURCE: "Rimbaud and Verlaine, Together Again," in The New York Times Book Review, June 22, 1990, p. 11.

In the following review, Schiff provides a generally unfavorable assessment of In Memoriam to Identity.

The characters in Kathy Acker's nine novels are far less intriguing than the character on some of them—on the book jackets, that is. There one finds Kathy Acker glaring provocatively into the camera, her hair platinum and butch-cut, her lips poised somewhere between a pout and a slurp, her underwear exposed and with it her mighty bi, tri and quadriceps, festooned with snarly tattoos.

The pose is manifestly defiant; it hints at the sort of avantgarde, fervently underground credentials that Ms. Acker has earned with such novels as Great Expectations (1984), Don Quixote (1986) and Empire of the Senseless (1988)—the sort of credentials more youthful writers, however hip, can never quite summon these days (Ms. Acker, who has also...