IV: "hailed it as a 'crime caper' "

[Doug Millison]

  http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/dj-taylor-democratic-dissent-1769455.html

[…] What might be called the school of reductive criticism, in which  
complex and abstruse bits of art are boiled down to their absolute  
essence, can be a bracing experience. There is a queer sense of  
exhilaration, sometimes, in being told that Anna Karenina is really  
only an up-market romantic novelette, or that lying beneath the world- 
in-meltdown superstructures of Martin Amis's London Fields is a quite  
funny novel about darts. Even so, I was a touch startled to read a  
review of Thomas Pynchon's new novel Inherent Vices in one of the  
London freesheets, which hailed it as a "crime caper". The man in the  
Literary Review, alternatively, drew attention to Pynchon's playful  
pastiches and his "bleak evocation of the urban landscape", not to  
mention the snapshots of "a world starting to unravel".

Still, there is no getting away from the seductions of this kind of  
approach to art. I look forward to a re-reading of Finnegans Wake that  
sees it as a murder-mystery pure and simple (Who is Finnegan? How did  
he die?) and an account of The Waste Land ("April is the cruellest  
month, breeding / Lilacs out of the dead land", etc) as a  
fantastically left-field gardening manual. […]