Mark Perrino, _The Poetics of Mockery: Wyndham Lewis's The Apes of God and the Popularization of Modernism_

I HAVE READ a good many critical discussions of The Apes of God, and I would say this is the best. It is the most detailed, for one thing, a full-length book, while the others I have read are chapters or articles. (This may be the only full-length book on any text by Lewis, it occurs to me--I can't think of another off the top of my head, at least.)

For one thing, Perrino does a great job with the messy story of the publication and initial reception of The Apes. He also has a good, sturdy thesis: that the book belongs to the tradition of Menippean satire, a cudgelling of all and sundry in a mobile, taking-on-all-comers spirit, without having a fixed moral basis.

The book's greatest strength, though--seems odd to say this--arises from its having started out as a dissertation. Perrino has obviously lived with The Apes of God, knows it inside, outside, upside down and sideways. Plenty of folks know Ulysses or Moby-Dick or Paradise Lost this well, because they teach them year in and year out, but does anyone teach Apes year in and year out? I doubt it--too long, too weird, not on many exam lists. So only someone writing a dissertation on Apes would have gone in for a good long soak the way Perrino did. (Or someone editing it, like Paul Edwards, another trustworthy authority on the novel.) Every page in Perrino's book turns up one or another detail or connection that no reader of The Apes would have caught on the first pass, and one pass is often all Apes gets, even from people interested in Lewis.

Also noteworthy, though, is how well Perrino writes, and what balanced judgement he has. (This perhaps shows some serious post-dissertation work on the book, since dissertations often are neither well-written nor balanced, but I don't know in this case.) He understands and appreciates the novel, but he does not overstate the claims for it, recognizing how deeply uncharitable it is, but he is still persuasive on how uniquely powerful it is.

If Apes ever does become required reading, Perrino should be the go-to authority.