SOURCE: “Special Subjects,” in The New York Review of Books, August 14, 1986, pp. 37-8.

In the following excerpt, Enright offers an unfavorable assessment of Across.

… The title [of Across] alludes to the novel’s leitmotif, and the subject of several expert mini-essays: the threshold. “Discovering and describing thresholds became a passion with me,” albeit the Austrian narrator, by name Andreas Loser, does nothing so crude as to cross, in any discernible manner, any discernible boundary.

Possibly the narrator of Handke's earlier and more animated novel, Short Letter, Long Farewell, offers the tip when he explains that, in his view, to reduce a thing to a concept is to do away with it through the act of formulation, so that one doesn’t have to experience it again; to characterize is to degrade. Thereby hangs an avant-garde theory of fiction or anti-fiction, no doubt—one which disregards the fact that...