SOURCE: A review of Wittgenstein's Ladder, in Review of Contemporary Fiction, Vol. 17, No. 2, Summer, 1997, pp. 297–98.

In the following review, Saunders praises Wittgenstein's Ladder, but notes occasional lapses of theoretical rigor in the work.

If books could be cataloged by season, Wittgenstein's Ladder would be a summer: clear, temperate, disencumbered of hibernal rigors, undisturbed by stormy skies. The book explores what Marjorie Perloff terms a “Wittgensteinian poetics” both in works that bear a structural resemblance to Wittgenstein's thought and in texts that explicitly invoke him as an influence. On the one hand, the book offers a lucid introduction to the life and thought of Viennese philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, as well as intriguing readings of Gertrude Stein, Samuel Beckett, and a series of less canonical writers. On the other hand, it skips over theoretical problems with a frustrating insouciance.

Marjorie Perloff takes her title from the final page of the...