SOURCE: “Walter Abish,” in The Life of Fiction, University of Illinois Press, 1977, pp. 62–70.

In the following survey of Abish's fiction, Klinkowitz argues that Abish uses postmodern and absurdist techniques and draws attention to them in order to undermine the uses of language that constrict rather than reveal meaning.

Despite his foreign background and experiences, Walter Abish is nonetheless thoroughly Americanized. Like Donald Barthelme, he plays with substitutions and inversions in the modern American landscape, taking our habitual mores and exposing the silliness they mask. Knowing he's from Vienna makes it all the more fun. In his story “More by George” from the New Directions #27 (1973) anthology, a couple together with hitchhiker and camper travel from Vienna, Maryland, to Vienna, Georgia (pop. 3,718). There the people are about to celebrate “the anniversary marking the defeat of the Turks, as well as, one hundred fifty years later, the publication of a slim...