Reviewing the 2015 re-issue of the novel, Peter Craven, in The Sydney Morning Herald, noted that the novel "is some kind of psychological thriller and it is not one of the books by which all others are to be judged, but it does have a strange confounding power of its own."

It is an unwieldy book, self-indulgent in its articulation, by a writer of genius slumming it in a popular mode.

It is, in various ways, corrupted by both the pretentiousness of its burbling arabesques of style and opinionation and by the vulgarity of the form with flashiness working to adorn a trashiness that lacks any principle of economy.

He seems to have intended to write a thriller saturated in the particularly noir mixture of longing, regret, and obsessiveness.

Those elements, along with any tension, are lost in the thickets of more than 400 pages, which feel too much like a philosophical inquiry.