SOURCE: “The Sorrows of Young Writers,” in Washington Post Book World, August 26, 1984, p. 7.

In the following excerpt, Cook offers a positive assessment of The Weight of the World.

The avant-garde thrives in Germany and Austria as nowhere else in Europe. Solemn, strenuously intellectual and glumly determined not to entertain, the literary artists who are best known and most discussed go their own way, fiercely independent of all and everything except the state cultural agencies whose subsidies support them. Not that they would stoop to make willing compromise to the fatherland that feeds them—oh no, they mock the Germans and the Austrians unmercifully!—but almost to a man (and woman) they remain quite scrupulously apolitical. Presumably, the theory is that if they say nothing, then they can give no offense.

The Austrian playwright and novelist Peter Handke probably stands as foremost among them. Although his plays and novels...