SOURCE: A review of 99: The New Meaning, in The Literary Review, Vol. 35, No. 1, Fall, 1991, pp. 163–64.

In the following review, Doreski praises Abish's experimental artifice in constructing narratives from previously used sentences in 99: The New Meaning.

Walter Abish's new book [99: The New Meaning] invokes the convention of the pensée, the isolated, reified “thought,” to underscore the tendency of all fine or literary writing to privilege the sentence or paragraph and thus undermine the author's intention of rendering cohesive larger entities—short stories or novels. His procedure is to select and arrange fragments of narrative from various authors—ninety-nine of them in the title piece, fifty in “What Else,” and so on—and by juxtaposing these fragments create oddly shifting dramas of emotional introspection. The results suggest novels like Nausea composed of fictional diary or journal entries in which rhetorical discontinuity embodies strain or anxiety.

Abish, somewhat disingenuously, claims...