In Nog (1969) and Flats (1970) Wurlitzer demonstrated a remarkable ability to penetrate to the controlling forms and feelings at work below the surface of a profoundly confused, anarchical, and vacuous American society and mentality. His incisiveness together with fusions of the ironic, the grotesque, and the comic, the deployment of a relatively cool or detached first-person narrator, and a deceptively unassuming style is found again in his third novel, Quake (1972). Wurlitzer draws upon the strengths of his earlier fictions in a way which gives Quake a freshness and validity of its own. Like Flats the most recent novel explores the apocalyptic vein but in a manner more nearly that of Nog; the handling of characterization, setting, and imagery reminds one particularly of the latter. Where Flats probes the no-man's land separating "meaning" and absurdity in the manner of Beckett. Quake typically gives greater emphasis to the ironies and confusions...