SOURCE: "Monster Frankenstein's Doctor," in Los Angeles Times Book Review, July 22, 1990, p. 3.

Eder is a Pulitzer Prize-winning critic, journalist, and educator. In the following negative review of Gothic Romance, he complains that the plot and style of Carrère's novel are overly complicated and lacking in substance.

Emmanuel Carrère's Gothic Romance turns the dicta of contemporary literary theory into a sardonic mystery novel; a play of twists and reverses that mocks the frontier between the fictional and the real. It is what Umberto Eco did in Foucault's Pendulum, and the two novels much resemble each other.

Both are consistently and sometimes joyously clever; both are remarkably good at creating a world of suspense. And in both, the deconstructionist or deflationary process—the joke to the effect that no figure in the story is any more real than something this figure may be imagining or making up a...