Pynchon Punctured

With all the buzz over the new Pynchon novel, trust Ms Kakutani to give a few sharp jabs to puncture the balloon: "[It] 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."

Update: She isn't the only one. Louis Menand writes: "Of course, all of Pynchon’s novels...are long, rambling, multilayered, underplotted, quasi-unfinished monsters. But with this one there is the feeling that the magician has fallen in love with his own stunts, as though Pynchon were composing a pastiche of a Pynchon novel."