To enter the fictional world of Imaginary Women is to revisit a lively cultural era where one read Jacques Lacan and Roland Barthes in the morning, sampled the cinema in the afternoon, and danced to The Clash at night. In an unnamed city in the novel the thirteen fictional women deployed in its coordinate system of interlocking stories both diverge and reconnect in an intricate web of play and puzzles. Composed in short sections, Westlake freely reimagines the narrative language of popular genres such as film noir, science fiction, and the political thriller, and reinvents the...