THE BOOK OF CHANGES

A popular writing professor at Hollins College, Dillard has labored in a number of genres (poetry, fiction, criticism, translation), none of them to great renown. And this novel, first published in 1974, will do nothing to change that impression. Dillard gestures in all the trendy directions of the era: pointless experimentation represented by typographical play; a plethora of high and low cultural allusions; and a deliberately bizarre and confusing plot. Kirkus was no less dismissive in 1974, lambasting Dillard’s “potsmoke prose, bursting with babygoo beatifics.” The agitated reader considered “Dillard’s Book of Joints” to be full of “any cheapjack geegaw he can crumple into a purple paragraph.” Comparing it to Cortázar’s more rewarding Hopscotch, in which the hodgepodge design adds up to something wonderful, Kirkus thought, in Dillard’s case, “nothing can be made of nothing.”