SOURCE: “The Puzzle of Walter Abish: In The Future Perfect,” in Sub-Stance, Vol. IX, No. 2, 1980, pp. 115–24.

In the following essay, Arias-Misson argues that Abish deconstructs language by using devices like listing and counting the words used in his texts in order to show “the fictitious nature of our truths.”

Combinations, copulations, permutations, deletions, transferences, transgressions, substitutions, cross-references, doublings: Walter Abish fabricates puzzles—puzzles of sex, puzzles of minds, puzzles of death—and words and images, letters and numbers are the matter of a puzzle. In his first novel, astonishingly amusing Alphabetical Africa, section A is assembled only with words beginning with a, section B only with a's and b's, C only with a's, b's, and c's and so on to Z, then into reverse, deleting first all z words, then z's and y's until in the last section, A, only a's are left again. A fabulous letter-land thus...