One of the irritating facts of the current literary scene is that Peter Handke is absolutely the cat's meow in intellectually arty circles now…. [Handke's fiction] consists especially of The Goalie's Anxiety at the Penalty Kick (1972), a terrific title, and [The Left-Handed Woman]. Both are written in a spare, clean, even emptied style; one fights the urge to speak portentously of the spaces and silences between the words, and of the gulfs that yawn between one character's speech and another's failure to answer. And of the inexplicable depths of human nature brought still wet and gasping to the surface…. (p. 232)

[As] always he writes in a fake style—knowing when it chooses to be, elliptical only for effect …, and making a mountain out of a molehill even as the work denies that either exists…. Handke leads critics to invoke, as Borges would say, the names of other writers...