From Publishers Weekly
Billed as "the first-ever novel to be serialized on the World Wide Web," Cooper's ambitious but unfocused second novel (after Amnesia) delivers a jumpy narrative more suitable for cyberspace than for the traditional page. Aging architect Ariel Price dominates his colleagues and companions all his life until, traveling in Israel, he receives the first chapter of a hostile biography undertaken by obscure Canadian academic Theseus Crouch. Unwilling to submit to exposure in print, Price decides to murder his biographer. Fragmented from the beginning, the narrative moves in short scenes full of archly exotic characters, chief among them Price's deformed former assistant and the innocent, abused waif whom he befriends. Both Price and Crouch return intermittently to center stage but never long enough for their conflict to gain steam. Intentionally labyrinthine (references to mazes dot the text), the plot never quite lives up to its high concept, while Cooper's polished sententiae (on architecture, the nature of thought, urban life) strain for solemnity at the expense of character and place. Lacking the human sprawl of a similarly moralizing, untidy work like William Gaddis's The Recognitions, this undeniably intelligent but slow little book devolves too often into what seems a rather forced jeu d'esprit.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Kirkus Reviews
The desire of architecture to impose order, and the repercussions of artistic ``overreaching,'' are given dramatic and often cryptic symbolic expression in this unusual second novel (``the first-ever to be serialized on the Web'') from the Canadian- born Cooper, who's a comic-surrealist crossbreed of the late Lawrence Durrell and William S. Burroughs. Several different stories are told by a narrator whose eventual revelation of his identity links this novel closely to its predecessor, 1994's Amnesia (with which Delirium should probably be read in tandem). Famous architect Ariel Price (born Preuss), who had dreamed of creating a Toronto that would match the structural marvels of Paris, has instead constructed ``a tombstone growing from the heart of a labyrinth'' in the eyes of those who judge him, and must face the consequences of his exploitation of a young street waif (Bethany), and his resolvebased on his insistence that ``no life bears scrutiny'' (a refrain repeated throughout)to murder Theseus Crouch, his putative biographer. And, in a series of ``Parallel Lives,'' which pair up other characters in disastrous combinations, Cooper teasingly explores (often obscure) connections among art, human aspiration, ``whoredom,'' and punishment. A further puzzling dimension is added by Ariel's ``discovery'' of the submerged city of Gomorrah; by the relationship between his daughter Arianna and Izzy Darlow (from Amnesia), who's researching the architecture of biblical cities; and by the implicit likening of Bethany's self-abasement to the tortuous reformation of Mary Magdalen (here identified with a prostitute, ``Saintes-Maries,'' and perhaps also a masochistic performance artist, Scilla, who enchants businessman Tom Sorrow, who works in Ariel Price's most celebrated office building). The compromising of visionary ideals by contact with sublunary lust and greed is clearly a central theme in a baffling, fascinating fiction that seems part of a multivolume work still in progress. One wonders what will succeed Amnesia and Delirium. A further descent into the maelstrom, or some promise of recovery? --
Copyright ©1998, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
by Douglas Cooper
