[I imagine that Doctor Rat] is going to sound funny as hell (it isn't). I imagine that we will be told by some otherwise intelligent people that it's the kind of funny book that's going to make a lot of angry people a whole lot angrier (it won't). And worse, it's simply a bad book, a puffed-up book, claiming humility.
An animal fable with a presumed moral purpose behind it, the book, at a glance, might seem promising enough. A satire on the atrocities of human experimentation on animals, it does have behind it the traditions at least of Aesop and the allegorical satire of Orwell. But for this, for what Kotzwinkle has really given us, I was not prepared. I am not speaking of the grotesqueries of the science lab, though there are those, many of those, but of the out-and-out shallowness, the sophomoric arrogance of the book itself. It's worse than banal; it is finally, I would say, a misleading, manipulative book that is likely to pass for a highly "moral" statement, when, in fact, it has nothing very moral in it, and little that's even good. I include especially those intended-to-be moving and "eloquent evocations of animal consciousness" that are used throughout the book as interchapters punctuating the main story.
