The Octopus has an intense, hallucinatory quality that is impressive, but at the same time I would regard it as a less original and less startling achievement than [Robert] Creeley claims. 'The first decisive writing,' he says, 'to make adamantly clear what present experience of "people and places" is really all about.' More modestly, the book describes a fairly familiar sort of alienation and disturbance of mind, in a vivid American context certainly, but in style and method strongly reminiscent of both Beckett and Golding, to say nothing of lesser writers who have already explored similar territory. The hero—perhaps recovering from some mental illness (as is suggested by a nurse figure at one point), perhaps simply plagued by an acute identity-and-communication problem which makes him behave oddly, collect fact-catalogues and feel hunted—wanders about America…. He would like to find a place where he would...