Among other themes, Pleasure-Dome ponders [the] "surrender" of Lucius Hutchfield to the Coleridge syndrome, intoxication by imagination. Lucius is the same young lover of illusion who worked in the movie house that gave David Madden's novel Bijou (1974) its title. Since then he may have expanded his romantic references beyond films and Thomas Wolfe, but he is still hooked on the narcotic of fantasy and its intellectual superior, art.

As he wanders over the ruins of Zara's life and begins fabricating Jesse James stories to amaze a local motorcycle cowboy, Lucius locates the center of Madden's concern in writing a novel that often seems to be about the act of writing a novel….

[The] Pleasure-Dome that captivates Lucius Hutchfield/David Madden is "a zone of being where the facts and illusions of everyday life and the problem of making distinctions between them were irrelevant." So too with this exhilarating...