Hugh Hood is an intellectual writer. Moreover, he's a very ambitious one. In blunt terms: he's a mind-stretcher. In fact, Hood attempts dimensions in his fiction which most writers would just as soon experience for themselves in somebody else's work. Furthermore, he sees himself as a writer not in going from one book to the next, but in terms of a life's work….

And, although he is a deceptively simple writer (a description he hates, I believe, and understandably) and easy enough to read, the hard fact is that he is a complicated writer and sometimes difficult to understand. This must somehow perplex critics who are accustomed to having their ambitious writers do rather obviously strange things with typography, vocabulary, and syntax. But, as Hood has said, he never had any intention of being "in any way an experimental or avant-garde writer."

To discover Hood at his most...