SOURCE: Eder, Richard. Review of Fiskadoro, by Denis Johnson. Los Angeles Times Book Review (5 May 1985): 1, 12.

In the following positive review, Eder praises Fiskadoro, calling the work “a leap of imagination, with no loss of precision and perceptiveness.”

Science fiction at its best can do, in reverse, what certain kinds of history can do. Casting its intuition forward, instead of backward, it illuminates our life.

The intuitions in Denis Johnson's Fiskadoro are luminous and suggestive. Thinking into the remnants of what may lie beyond a nuclear holocaust, the novel replants a marooned bit of humanity as if it were a cutting, and recounts the old traits and the new ones that sprout from it.

The mainland of the United States has been destroyed, and perhaps other parts of the world as well. We do not know, exactly, because Fiskadoro keeps us in the hauntingly confined circle of its characters'...