SOURCE: “Another Old Atrocity,” in Times Literary Supplement, No. 4234, March 25, 1984.

In the following review, Josipovici dismisses Abish's stories as banal and vulgar exercises in “American pseudo-experimentalism.”

“Remnants of the old atrocity subsist, but they are converted into ingenious shifts in scenery, a sort of ‘English Garden’ effect, to give the required air of naturalness, pathos and hope.” These words of John Ashbery's form the epigraph to the first story in Walter Abish's collection [In the Future Perfect]. They are menacing and haunting precisely because they are so simple, so clear. What old atrocity? we wonder, and who converts and who requires? The passage is troubling precisely because we all seem to be implicated, because it suggests that all patterning, no matter how innocent, is a way of concealing; but, by the same token, that all patterning, however innocent, carries the tell-tale signs of its origins.

Unfortunately this is...