The Fool-Spy

117 pp. "'The Fool Spy' tells of a romance with history in with lover, B. O. Wolfe (Beowulf) is buried, and his apparent heroism converted into mockery, by the very means which serve to perpetuate heroism: hearsay and legend. The situation of John Kuehl's brilliant first novel is by no means new, but Kuehl--with rigorous extravagance and an intricate vocabulary of irony--sees the situation through to its vortex of uncertainty; rigging literary and ideological conventions against themselves and each other, using a mirror-gallery of narrative, second and third and fourth-hand accounts, tall stories; envisioning history, not as a synthesized whole, but as a crepuscular haze, which--thanks to Kuehl's precisely formal yet dexterous command of dialogue--takes place in an eternal present, with the future a void and the past a phantasmagoria. His irony, then, performs the one endlessly worthwhile function of irony: it urges unswallowable truth upon us, with a candor so straight and so intricate, that it can only be accepted as humor and paradox."