Bartleby is an endlessly inventive comic masterpiece, and the finest continuation of Tristram Shandy ever written. The novel contains copious interruptions and digressions, parodies of the picaresque, Dickensian grotesques, sensationally outre wordplay, an abundance of lists, wildly unhinged improvisation, obsessive riffs on authorship, and characters cribbed from Beckett, Vidal, and Melville. All rise to salute the triumphant return of Bartleby to print!

The end of all this flamboyance is not merely to bewail the rigidity of the straightforward narrative process of modern realistic fiction but also to affirm the joyful, invigorating spontaneity of the spoken/written word–and not merely to berate the categorising impulses of the modern society that are epitomised by the realistic novel, but also to insist on the continuing human capacity to utter the idiosyncracies, potentialities, aspirations, and unpredictable forays of the creatuve mind. – Canadian Literature