Incandescence is one of those novels that confront an awful world by generating brisk, tough, comic patter about sharply observed details of an incorrigibly vulgar culture. The suggestion is always that the absurd or horrifying is in fact perfectly normal, quite what one had been expecting, without power to hurt, depress, or anger. Nova is quite good at it, and the novel has its fine moments….

Like some other pleasures, writing like Nova's makes you long for ever more subtle and complicated versions of what you've just had, and the occasional miscalculation, however slight, encourages a suspicion—perhaps unfair—that rhetoric, not experience and understanding, is doing most of the work here. (p. 40)

Thomas R. Edwards, "Feeding on Fantasy," in The New York Review of Books, Vol. XXVI, No. 12, July 19, 1979, pp. 41-2.∗