SOURCE: "Homage to the Great Punks of Our European Heritage," in Los Angeles Times Book Review, August 12, 1990, pp. 1, 8.

Below, Clark reviews In Memoriam to Identity.

In previous books like Don Quixote and Great Expectations, Kathy Acker has patented an audacious, irreverent, provocatively highhanded method of recycling classic literary texts in a manner variously reminiscent of Dadaist and surrealist procedures, Burroughsian cut-up and the "appropriation" tactics currently in vogue in the visual arts.

Effecting an arresting tacit critique by wrenching original works out of context and re-scaling them to purposes quite distinct from their authors' intentions, these collaged "ready-made" novels also manage to generate a formal modality and impetus all their own. It is a technique uniquely suited to Acker's radical aesthetic strategies, central among which are the subversion and redeployment of language as an instrument of power.

Here, in her ninth novel, Acker explicitly identifies her sources in...