[The Geek] belongs to a distinct but elusive Anglo-American genre, which includes a lot of Hemingway, Lowry's Under the Volcano, and a good deal of John Hawkes: that form of fiction which pits a solitary Anglo-Saxon against an ancient, alien, and violent culture….

There is something too cryptic about a lot of the novel's transactions, a suggestion of dialogue out of Henry James shifted to a dusty taverna, and, as I say, the writing keeps reaching for effects that are more than a little lurid. But the blending of emblematic and literal truth … is remarkable. The specificity of the island landscape, the clear characters and past history of the individual islanders, the careful tracing of Boot's reactions to separate events, all help to pitch The Geek somewhere between reality and nightmare, as if it were a dream that had found its own geography in the material world, or...