SOURCE: A review of Literal Madness, in The New York Times, December 30, 1987, p. C20.

In the following review, Kakutani offers a tempered critical evaluation of Literal Madness.

In such previous books as Great Expectations (1984) and Don Quixote (1986), Kathy Acker not only set out to work variations on classic literary texts, but also to subvert all of our traditional expectations concerning causality, narrative form and moral sensibility. The effect is like reading William S. Burroughs while watching an avant-garde theater group perform to the sounds of a punk band—if you happen to like that sort of thing. Characters exchange identities with the ease of snakes shedding skins; and bits of myths, folk tales and older novels also turn up transformed—juxtaposed, in a sort of post-modernist collage, with political screeds, dream-like hallucinations and strange, comic exchanges. The language is nervous and skewed; the authorial stance, adversarial and abrasive...