Paul West is probably tired of being called an "intelligent writer," and finding himself compared to Anthony Burgess and Vladimir Nabokov book after book…. Worse, Paul West is probably tired of being categorized as an English writer and set in the tradition of those he admires: D. H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf, E. M. Forster….

Paul West is a complicated man—his books almost as complex—full of enormous energy which he has somehow never managed to unleash, although his works are impressive and the list of them nearly as long as those of the writers he admires….

[If] we, as readers, are ever to understand and appreciate West, as we finally learned to appreciate Burgess and Nabokov after so many embarrassing misperceptions, then we must establish how he uses the mind, through metaphor, to impose order on a disordered universe.

In his critical essays, West says that metaphor...