SOURCE: Sage, Lorna. “Laif-Lahk.” Times Literary Supplement, no. 4977 (21 August 1998): 21.

In the following review, Sage examines the themes of isolation and alienation in Next, calling the novel a “moving book, despite its dryness and deliberation.”

Christine Brooke-Rose's new novel [Next] is set in London, and wanders the streets with the unemployed and the homeless, who pass on the burden of telling the story to one another like a baton in some shambling relay race. It is a very realist setting for a notoriously anti-realist writer—Beckett meets Bleak House—but, on reflection, there is an impeccable logic in Brooke-Rose's identification with her derelicts. These rough sleepers and monologuists, like the New Novelists of the 1950s and 60s, have lost the plot and the conviction of having characters. And they are no longer the representative outsiders, but part of a contemporary social map that is so big and bitty that...