Nightwood, when celebrated at all, has traditionally been celebrated as a sort of sui generis glorious mess: critics are more likely to gesture toward it reverently than to engage it critically. In this entirely fresh and surprising reading, Bonnie Roos succeeds admirably in demonstrating just how carefully and cunningly wrought Barnes's novel is, and what prodigious cultural and political work it's still capable of. Roos restores to us the Nightwood that so entranced and menaced her editor T. S. Eliot, and in the process, pays tribute to the novel's ungovernable energies.
