SOURCE: Sage, Lorna. “In Which All Have a Good Time.” Times Literary Supplement, no. 4622 (1 November 1991): 20.

In the following review, Sage argues that Textermination is ultimately a critique of realist notions of the reader, calling the central theme of the novel “at once witty and despairing.”

The imaginative conceit on which Christine Brooke-Rose's new novel [Textermination] is based is at once witty and despairing. Characters from all the novels and stories you've ever read—and quite a few you haven't—gather in the San Francisco Hilton for the annual convention where they pray for Being, that they may live on for ever in the canon. Emma Woodhouse gets into the carriage with Mr Elton one more time, and finds herself whisked off in a quite different direction, along with an elderly stranger speaking German, who is himself pursued by a large Lotte (“Wo ist Goethe?”), in a dress far...