Magazine

Going Into the Woods, by Christine Boese

Selections from The End of Books:

By Robert Coover, New York Times Book Review, June 21, 1992.

"...[T]his new area is indeed an exciting, provocative, if frequently frustrating medium for the creation of new narratives, a potentially revolutionary space, capable, exactly as advertised, of transforming the very art of fiction, even if, it now remains somewhat at the fringe, remote still, in these very early days, from the mainstream."

"We are always astonished to discover how how much of the reading and writing experience occur in the interstices and trajectories between text fragments. That is to say, text fragments are like stepping stones, there for our safety, but the real current of the narratives runs between them."

"Venerable novelistic values like unity, integrity, coherence, vision, voice seem to be in danger. Eloquence is being redefined. 'Text' has lost its canonical certainty. How does one judge, analyze, write about a work that never reads the same way twice?

And what about narrative flow? There is still movement, but in hyperspace's dimensionless infinity, it is more like endless expansion; it runs the risk of being so distended and slackly driven as to lose its centripetal force, to five way to a kind of static low-charged lyricism--that dreamy gravityless lost-in-space feeling of early sci-fi films."