Among other themes, Pleasure-Dome ponders [the] "surrender" of Lucius Hutchfield to the Coleridge syndrome, intoxication by imagination. Lucius is the same young lover of illusion who worked in the movie house that gave David Madden's novel Bijou (1974) its title. Since then he may have expanded his romantic references beyond films and Thomas Wolfe, but he is still hooked on the narcotic of fantasy and its intellectual superior, art. As he wanders over the ruins of Zara's life an...

Harlequin's Stick—Charlie's Cane is a playful instrument, an academic toy. This is not to say the work is unimportant. The movie industry was based upon scientific, optical toys, such as the zoetrope. What David Madden has given us is a gift in the form of a scholarly peepshow…. (p. 285) Mr. Madden's volume comes at a good time. It seems obvious, and appropriate to his [subjects, Commedia dell'Arte and the silent movie], that Mr. Madden has a great sense of fun and ...

"The unmoonlit life is not worth living." So says Lucius Hutchfield, narrator of Pleasure-Dome, and that is perhaps as straightforward a thematic statement as can be gleaned from this odd, lyrical, quite wonderful novel. Unlike most contemporary fiction, it is neither urban in setting nor psychological in attack. It shares the first-person narrator of much recent work, but it does not share its almost obsessive concern with the narrator's inner life. Lucius' personal growth throu...

David Madden's "Pleasure-Dome" is …, in its way, a meditation on time and change, and in the manner of the New Fiction it combines profligate storytelling with reflections on the storytelling process…. Fortunately for the reader, David Madden's material is matched by his art. Where but in the New Fiction could one find a voice to describe the Tweetsie Railroad, a product of the entrepreneurial imagination in which tourists submit to a mock robbery for the benefit of...