Once one is acclimatized to [Hoban's] mannerisms—a blend of conscious advertising and journalistic jargon and highly quirky use of words, and to his personification of inanimate objects—[Kleinzeit] flows freely….

It will be noted that Mr. Hoban has solved the problem facing all "medical" novelists. Instead of cluttering up his pages with baffling technical terms, he invents his own as he goes along….

It is a measure of Mr. Hoban's talent that [the frolics he depicts], some of them childish and not to all tastes, contribute to the serious impact of his novel. He is a master of the significantly trivial…. The action is worked out by Kleinzeit, Sister and the doctors, but also by personifications: Hospital, who welcomes Kleinzeit not only as a patient but as a lover, Death with dirty finger-nails, Word whose proud boast is that he "employs God", Pain, not a single being...