SOURCE: "Boy Talk," in Los Angeles Times Book Review, June 25, 1989, p. 5.

Cahill is an American educator and literary critic. In the following review, he unfavorably assesses Dead Languages, claiming that the story is neither "comedy [nor tragedy," and that it gets lost in metaphors and in the self-indulgence of the protagonist.]

It is hard work nowadays to write what the Germans call a Bildungsroman, an autobiographical novel of growing up. Though it is a form that most first novelists find inescapable, the great challenge is to make something new, something that cannot be labeled merely an also-ran to Joyce or Hesse or Spark or Salinger. Each year the competition grows fiercer as the unexplored portions of this particular literary rain forest shrink in size. One must find either a new way to say the old things (in a time when new ways seem to have been exhausted in...