Kathy Acker Critical Essay | Critical Review by Maureen Howard

SOURCE: A review of Don Quixote, in Los Angeles Times Book Review, November 9, 1986, p. 6.

In the following review, Howard offers a tempered assessment of Don Quixote.

Kathy Acker's work is not outrageous. That is what first comes to mind reading the abortion scene that launches her new novel, Don Quixote. We have all been there—not to the bloody chamber of horrors she describes—but to the highly fabricated world of this story. Unless we have been wrapped in cotton wool or sent to the nunnery, we are fully prepared for the sexual and political extremes with which Acker purposes to alarm, amuse, and, at times, anesthetize the readers of her fiction.

Described rather nervously as punk, postmodern, or even postpunk, her novel is not all that hard to classify. It is fashionably self-indulgent Lower East Side Lit Major. Happily, Acker is better educated, more thoughtful and more talented...
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