Michiko Kakutani: “Jack’s ‘melancholic logorrhea’ might yield some useful therapeutic results, but in terms of storytelling, it makes for a tedious, self-indulgent and cruelly eye-glazing read.”
The Cleveland Plain Dealer: “Perhaps in an attempt to depict that innocence, Irving has created a personality-free main character who spends much of the story in a curiously passive state. Do such people exist? Everywhere. They are as frustrating in real life as they are in books.”
Boston Globe: “Irving takes no more notice of an amputated limb than a stray pimple. A shattered life impels no more wobble in his plot’s dense tread than a crumbled cookie strewn across a graying plate, so the reader is deprived of a useful collision with a sensibility truly at odds with one’s own.”
New York Daily News: “[T]he book is emotionally barren, antsy in its execution, and too precious by half.”
[ALSO RELATED: Jimmy Beck’s “Hip Hoputani”]
© 2005, DrMabuse. All rights reserved.
Sounds like its unanimous. Reviewers–and readers– are fed up with characters who are as self-indulgent and boorish as their least favorite brother-in-law.