SOURCE: "Lesson No. 1: Eat Your Mind," in The New York Times Book Review, October 16, 1988, pp. 9, 11.

In the following review, Dillard offers a favorable assessment of Empire of the Senseless.

In Kathy Acker's novel My Death My Life by Pier Paolo Pasolini, she made the suggestion that "everything in the novel exists for meaning. Like hippy acid rock. All this meaning is the evil, so I want to go back to those first English novels: Smollett, Fielding, Sterne: novels based on jokes or just that are."

Ms. Acker's new novel, Empire of the Senseless, which her publisher describes tentatively and hopefully as her "most accessible novel to date," is in many ways directly related to those 18th-century novels and the even earlier ones of Defoe. In it, Thivai, a would-be pirate, sets forth on a quest, guided only by this code: "GET RID OF MEANING. YOUR MIND IS A...