R. M. Berry

I agree with the first reviewer on Amazon; it's a very uneven collection. There are many promising premises; one begins 'Among the novels I will never write...'And there are some wonderful prose poems, such as 'Pretense,' which are more or less in the manner of Barthelme (and, more distantly, in the manner of Borges (or, although this a long shot, in the manner of Lem (or, ultimately, even more distantly still, but really more plausibly, in the manner of Kafka's one-page stories))). But the anguish is unevenly distributed. Moments of anguish are glued together using a viscous paste of postmodern, North American MFA-style experimentation.… (mehr)