David Madden's "Pleasure-Dome" is …, in its way, a meditation on time and change, and in the manner of the New Fiction it combines profligate storytelling with reflections on the storytelling process….

Fortunately for the reader, David Madden's material is matched by his art. Where but in the New Fiction could one find a voice to describe the Tweetsie Railroad, a product of the entrepreneurial imagination in which tourists submit to a mock robbery for the benefit of the Community Chest? Mr. Madden has the local idiom down to the last "I-God," and his manic plot inventions defy recapitulation. Lurking in the background are the bulldozers of an encroaching trash culture ready to obliterate the authentic scenes and artifacts of folk myth, but "Pleasure-Dome" is a delightfully loony restoration.

James Park Sloan, "Three Novels: 'Pleasure Dome'," in The New York Times Book Review (© 1979 by The New York Times Company...