SOURCE: "The Weight of the Matter," in Washington Post Book World, May 26, 1996, p. 5.

[In the following review, Monaghan praises Akst's St. Burl's Obituary as "ingenious and thought-provoking."]

St. Burl's Obituary starts out like a thriller. The hero, Burl Bennett, savoring his approaching meal, enters a New York Italian restaurant where he brushes by a small, intense man who looks as if "he must have just killed somebody." And indeed he has. In the dining room are three bodies, victims of a Mafia rubout. The staff is in the kitchen, cowering face down on the floor.

But despite this opening, the novel is only tangentially a thriller. Rather, it is a map of the contemporary world, a black comedy that carries Burl, fearfully fleeing the Mafia, into the belly of the American beast. A newspaperman specializing in thoughtful obituaries, Burl is also a writer who has been working on...