[In Post-Modernist literature there is an obsession] with the primacy of style and structure over "subject matter": The artist is willfully and ingeniously refined out of existence, as Joyce never was, so that the perfect art would be art in a vacuum—a perfect vacuum—not only self-referential but lacking a self to which to refer. Stanislaw Lem, a Polish writer of science fiction, states in the parody-review of a parody-introduction to his own book, "A Perfect Vacuum": "Literature to date has told us of fictitious characters. We shall go further: we shall depict fictitious books. Here is a chance to regain creative liberty, and at the same time to wed two opposing spirits—that of the belletrist and the critic."

An ambitious project, fraught with intriguing perils: To create ghost-books obliquely glimpsed in reviews (alas, they are really review essays and sometimes disquietingly lengthy) that are in...