The poet John Malcolm Brinnin wrote that on finishing the novel, he had immediately picked it up again and reread it: “The didactic side of me wants to treat it in the way art historians take paintings and reduce them to geometry, just to show that, behind all the shapes and colours there is that reticulum of ideas, that controlling hand,” adding that he was “in a sort of enchanted jeopardy: I swear you write just for me.”