SOURCE: A review of Out of Sight, in Nation, Vol. 263, No. 12, October 21, 1996, p. 33.

In the following review, Gottlieb responds negatively to Out of Sight.

To put spoken language into writing is a mere trick. And I found it—nobody else. Making spoken words go in literature isn't stenography: you have to change the sentences and rhythms somehow, to distort them—to use an artifice, so that when you read a book, it's as though someone is actually speaking to you. The same thing happens as with a stick plunged into water. If you want it to look straight you have to break it slightly—or bend it…. When you put one end in, a normally straight stick looks bent—and the same with language. On the page, the liveliest dialogue taken down word for word seems flat, complicated, heavy…. To reproduce the effect of spontaneous spoken life on...