"Travels to the Enu" is not very long, yet somehow, after its brilliant beginning, it drags. The Enu are marvelously grotesque Swiftian creatures, but after a while the joke wears thin. Orlando's irony and King IT's jerky humor begin to sound like an angry tract. Lind starts out as Swift, and ends up on a soapbox complaining about skyscrapers, nuclear war, racial bigotry, international cartels and the cynical collaboration of the working classes. He calls this rotten state of affairs "the Fourth Reich." But by now the hard satirical edge is gone. This isn't satire anymore, it is bitching on a large scale, and we have heard it before. That is a shame, for there is an angry genius at work in "Travels to the Enu," although it doesn't quite manage to control its materials.

Paul Zweig, "Modest Proposals," in The New York Times Book Review (© 1982 by The...