A Kakutaniesque Turn by Kakutani

[Carvill John]

Very harsh review of ATD for NYT. Spoiler-free excerpts follow:

A Pynchonesque Turn by Pynchon

By MICHIKO KAKUTANI

"Thomas Pynchon’s new novel, “Against the Day,” reads like the sort of 
imitation of a Thomas Pynchon novel that a dogged but ungainly fan of this 
author’s might have written on quaaludes. It is a humongous, bloated jigsaw 
puzzle of a story, pretentious without being provocative, elliptical without 
being illuminating, complicated without being rewardingly complex."


"For all its razzle-dazzle brilliance, Mr. Pynchon’s earlier work tended to 
be cold, hard and despairing: devoid of any real sense of human connection, 
soulfulness or redemption. That began to change with his 1990 novel 
“Vineland,” which evinced a new interest in an individual’s relationship to 
family, and with “Mason & Dixon,” which made its heroes’ longings and dreams 
as palpable as their comic high jinks.

Although this impulse can be discerned in “Against the Day,” it’s blunted 
and stillborn."


http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/20/books/20kaku.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

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