[The] world of James Purdy's novels is the Post-existential one of Heller's and of Barth's: the world has no meaning which can be rationally discovered; human beings have no innate identity; human action is futile. It is true, too, that although Purdy's techniques appear at first to be closer to realism than Heller's and Barth's, in the sense that fewer obviously impossible events take place and that his settings are familiar places—Brooklyn, Chicago, towns in the Midwest—his intention is usually theirs: to reject the reader, to destroy his illusions about the novel as a form, and hence to bring about in him the experience of the absurd. Most of Purdy's techniques are, in fact, those of the other novelists of number [Ihab Hassan's label for certain Post-existential fantasists, here including also Heller, Barth, and Vonnegut, whose language creates worlds of "pure and arbitrary order," which it...