As a Barthelme-like exercise in discontinuous modes, lyrical, topical, and confessional, [Sombrero Fallout: A Japanese Novel] is amusing but somehow self-cancelling. The parable about mindless public violence is too harmlessly droll, the love story too sentimental, the portrait of the artist too routinely self-loathing. Remembering Brautigan's Trout Fishing in America, I would be glad to like Sombrero Fallout better, but his charm seems to be increasingly calculated. (p. 100)

Thomas R. Edwards, in Harper's (copyright © 1976 by Harper's Magazine; all rights reserved; reprinted from the October, 1976 issue by special permission), October, 1976.