Doctor Rat is a very contemporary novel by a writer who knows what the contemporary novel is for, and it tries to deliver what the times demand—an examination of modern society and a little conscience-forging for the race. It's an unashamed moral statement which upends verismo to get at basic truths. Although it's often funny, it's a very serious work which demands to be taken seriously. In spite of the respect for the author's talent that reading it inspires in me, taking it seriously involves me in a fundamental quarrel with the validity of its posture.

It's a novel about the Revolt of the Animals. Its principal character is a laboratory rat who has been castrated and driven mad by rat-running vivisectionists. (p. 97)

In the lab, where oppression is most acute and the rat population highly socialized, something like a classical Marxist uprising takes place—and Kotzwinkle...