According to reviewer Lore Segal, " He has published poetry, criticism, essays, memoirs ( including an extended, sometimes hilarious meditation on learning to swim in middle age ) and . . . novels of an unsettling nonuniformity . " Among the many writers who influenced West's work, writes literary critic David Madden, were Jean-Paul Sartre ( direct prose, existentialism, alienation, self-definition ); Shakespeare ( language ); Thomas De Quincey ( involutes; that is " compound experiences incapable of being disentangled " ); Samuel Beckett ( word play, nonconforming fiction ); and T . S . Eliot ( the objective correlative, which West called " an emotional shorthand; a morse for the soul " ).
