The esthetic roots of a work [like Asleep In the Sun]—self-contained, circular, non-referential, suicidal—are many, but the keystone may be found in that passage from the Bioy Casares-Borges collaboration, The Chronicles of H. Bustos Domecq, in which a literary critic, determined to perfectly assay The Divine Comedy, realizes that in order to do so he must reproduce the poem word for word—i.e., the only legitimate criticism of the text is the text itself. From this angle, Asleep In the Sun is private language masquerading as public language; a riddle that solves itself, asking only that the observer document the cycle.

This kind of puzzle often stumps the critic…. (p. 76)

It needn't be so. Asleep In the Sun is a text which through transparency of novelistic convention denies us direct access. The plot is comic book stuff, seasoned with no-tech science fiction, thematically related to...