[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 experimentat...

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...

While technically sportive and sometimes successfully lyrical, William Kotzwinkle's novel about man's inhumanity to rats, dogs, snakes, lions, elephants, bears, whales, turtles, etc. is so recklessly sentimental in its argument as to be food fit for Lynette (Squeaky) Fromme and other such fauna children. "Doctor Rat" did not quite make me want to go out and shoot dachshunds; but it did not persuade me, as it seems to have meant to, that laboratory research, using animals, into th...

There is nothing that says a suspense novel need not be well written…. As familiar, even overly familiar, as the form is, it nevertheless allows for wit, cleverness, displays of arcane knowledge, daring invention, and, every now and then, good writing. A case in point is Fata Morgana, by William Kotzwinkle, a fine young writer previously known for such "serious" novels as The Fan Man and Doctor Rat. The title of this new work is taken from the Italian and means a mirage, especially one ...

"Fata Morgana" is a curious mingling of genres: detective story and fairy tale. It manages to pull the reader in, because William Kotzwinkle, who has written for both children and adults, is able to move from the mundane to the grotesque, from magic to hard-nosed fact, without bruising his story…. Toys form a constant motif in the novel. They are "much finer than men, and much worse." The men and women in the book have all the appearances of animated dolls, with a system o...

Kotzwinkle knows that mysteries are the most satisfying of books not because everyone gets his just deserts but because in the best of them there are no gratuitous elements, no existential occurences. [In Fata Morgana] Inspector Picard follows the trail of the gypsy Lazare, and the elements which emerge from the fraudulent glitter of Paris—the abandoned lavishness of the masques, the tarot cards, the jeweled gowns trailing in the filth of the Paris streets—fall magically together. The world cr...

Mr. Kotzwinkle has done the unforgivable [in Fata Morgana]; he has bailed out of a fantasy by turning it all into a dream. Naughty, naughty—and besides, the climactic scene is pilfered from an old movie. Phoebe-Lou Adams, "PLA: 'Fata Morgana'," in The Atlantic Monthly (copyright © 1977 by The Atlantic Monthly Company, Boston, Mass.; reprinted with permission), Vol. 240, No. 1, July, 1977, p. 87.