SOURCE: "This Is Real Serious Talk," in Times Literary Supplement, January 8, 1993, p. 17.

In the following review, Montrose offers an unfavorable assessment of Impossible Vacation.

Introducing his autobiographical monologue, Monster in a Box (1991), Spalding Gray mentions how, at the age of eighteen, inspired by Thomas Wolfe, he vowed to become a writer. More than thirty years later, he came up with a truly Wolfean manuscript: 1,900 handwritten pages, the aforesaid "monster". Assuming the Max Perkins role, Gray's American editors have helped to cut and adjust "that sprawling mess" into the relative dwarf now published. Although primarily an account of the interruptions which beset Impossible Vacation, Monster in a Box does provide a synopsis of the original text. From this, it is apparent that the ending has been substantially truncated; a sudden jump earlier in the narrative—from 1968 to 1976—is also presumably the result of editing.

Although commissioned to write a...