SOURCE: "Take the DNA Train," in Los Angeles Times Book Review, September 29, 1991, pp. 2, 11.

In the following review, Harris suggests that The Gold Bug Variations may appeal to a limited audience for whom it is "essential" reading.

Let's begin with the Youngblood Hawke theory of fiction, promulgated by the hero of a forgotten Herman Wouk novel. To engage us seriously, says Hawke, a rumpled, expansive young writer modeled on Thomas Wolfe, a story must offer the equivalent of a "lovely, helpless girl tied to the railroad tracks … the wind blowing her skirts up around those pretty legs … and that train thundering around the mountain pass."

Hawke goes on: "Dostoyevsky tied that girl on the tracks in the first 50 pages of every book he ever wrote. Henry James … never wrote about anything else, hardly. Dickens had … avalanches coming down from both sides. Joyce didn't, no. That's why only English teachers...