MICHIKO KAKUTANI

[Robin Landseadel]

On Aug 4, 2009, at 12:22 PM, Nushra MohamedKhan wrote:

> So, I actually like her reviews.   I like her style. She doesn't like
> cartoons, but she got Michael Chabon right, and she got Toni Morrison
> right on cartooning, and she praises Wallace, and she got Joseph
> O'Neill right, and Louise Erdrich right, and Franzen, and Roth, and
> Jeeez, she got Pynchon right too. Sorry folks, but she gets to review
> the books because she is qualified and damn good at it. Sure, she's a
> tough critic, but that's a good thing. Seriously, if Pynchon were to
> listen to her, he's write better novels. AGTD is great, but man could
> it be improved if he took out some 300-odd pages and squared it up
> took out a couple few stupid plot lines and a  couplefew dozen
> chanracters and a dozen or two vague re-runs of old material like that
> Lew in the Tarot London stuff.
>
> Books of the Times
> Looking for a Home in the Limbo of Alaska
> By MICHIKO KAKUTANI
> Published: May 1, 2007
>
> http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/01/books/01kaku.html
>
> http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/04/books/04kaku.html
>
> http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/16/books/16book.html

I've been enjoying your posts even though I don't agree with  
everything in them. I can see how someone who finds T.W.I.T. & Lew and  
Nicholas Nookshaft  redundant or puerile would want to edit them out  
of AtD. Those were some of my favorite passages in Against the Day and  
backlit the White Visitation in rather engrossing ways.  That might  
mean more to those interested in Neo-Paganism & the Occult. De  
gustibus non est disputandum and I suspect that Michiko Kakutani  
doesn't share my taste in fiction but you are pretty much correct. She  
can write and she does point out some titles I might have been drawn  
to if I wasn't so busy re-reading Raymond Chandler right this moment.  
Michiko's certainly got the skills to pay the bills..