Tom Wolfe: I Am Charlotte Simmons

Self-made dandy and spatz monkey Tom Wolfe seems to have lost his mojo in this geriatric take on ‘der yoof’, I Am Charlotte Simmons.  Attempting to penetrate the female brain of a “sheltered freshman” in her first year at the fictional Dupont University, Wolfe reveals cliché after cliché concerning the hedonistic coed campus life, with its lusty jocks, debauched fraternities and sex described in rococo prose.

Reviewers felt that the 2-dimensional stereotype read more like a Wolfe in Simmons clothing, and poked fun at the fun Wolfe must have had “researching” the novel.  Also mocked is Wolfe’s wayward understanding of the linguistic tropes of Generation Y, which Grandpappy TW believes to be peppered with at least 3 F-words a sentence.

“Train wreck”, “600 + pound turkey”, or just the sad, embarassing fantasy of a Dirty Old WASP?

93 out of 617 reviewers felt that this Wolfe should have been gunned down like a rabid dog.

Three of the best:

I am not Tom Wolfe., September 8, 2008

By	E. Brady (Brooklyn, NY) – See all my reviews

Dear Mr. Wolfe,

I have no intention of donning a white suit and nursing a highball whilst I extol the vitues of George Bush and bemoan this new fangled interweb thingy.

Please refrain from pigeonholing my generation as a bunch of one-dimensional, sex-crazed morons. And yes, please stop saying “mons-pubis.” It is creepy and weird.

Best wishes,
lizz

Devils must die, November 20, 2005

By	Nathanial Grogan “styles678″ (CH, NC) – See all my reviews

Tom Wolfe is a devil (AKA a fat white conservative bastard). Now, what can you do with devils? It’s quite simple – you can take those devil-made guns that they put into our hands and turn their barrels upon them. The only good devils are the ones six feet under.

Laughably horrendous, March 8, 2006

By	Stacy – See a

This book is awful. I’d not read any Tom Wolfe before this, and only received the book as a Christmas gift. I couldn’t get past the first two chapters. This book was published in 2004, and I seem to remember from the blurb on the bookcover that Wolfe claimed to have done quite a bit of research on the subject. If so, I think his research ended in the early 90s. The slang that his characters speak comes from the era of Vanilla Ice. I am only out of college a few years and absolutely no one speaks in the language that Wolfe gave his characters; their words and phrases were hackneyed ten years ago. But it’s more than that, as egregious as that is in the face of the claims regarding exhaustive research. Everything about this book is inauthentic and contrived.

As a side note, when I brought it to my local used book store to trade in for credit, they wouldn’t take it. I couldn’t believe it, as it was brand new and in pristine condition. They told me they didn’t want it because they had quite a few copies of it already:

“Hmm,” I said, “I couldn’t get through it.”
“Yeah,” said the clerk, “neither could anyone else; that’s why we have so many copies.”

I left it outside the shop, on the ground.

Air on a G-string: is this the funniest 1-star review ever?

For those tempted by the tawdry, this is one Amazon review not to miss.  Nestled deep within the Apparel & Accessories section, it critiques a piece of lingerie, the rather unenticingly-named Silk Thong Micro G-String Thong Tear Drop Ring Panty, available in three colours: red, cobalt and black.

Joe Average, or just plain old “Joe”, produces a peachy piece of punditry, aimed squarely at getting giggles – and succeeds.

A masterclass in brevity and the five-star wit occasionally found in a 1★ review.

Vital stats:

• 3 out of 27 reviewers gave this G-string an F.
• 41 out of 61 found “Joe”s review helpful.
• 6 meta-commenters found his review most chortlesome.

Not for the larger girls, February 23, 2007

By	Joe Average “Joe” (Florida) – See all my reviews

I bought these for my girlfriend, who is never challenged by a large meal, plus a couple of desserts.

Long story short, she put them on and bent over to pick up her clothes from the floor. The damned things shot off and out through the window. We still haven’t found them.

Albert Camus’ The Stranger: Straining!

If Led Zeppelin had been reading the Amazon hive mind’s 1-star reviews for Albert Camus’ existentialist classic, The Stranger, they would have ended up penning a song entitled ‘Whole Lotta Hate’.  The 1-star brigade unleash plenty of bile at the French author’s abstruse text.

Gauloise-smoking pseudo-intellectual poseurs the world over have been haunting cafés and feeling angst-y since this book first appeared in the 1940s.  The ever-reliable 1-star brigade at Amazon.com provide their own howls of execration towards this book, resulting in the frequently offered exclamation, “Ugh!”

Bad faithed barbs come thick and fast: meaningless, confusing, pathetic, vile, and to be kept out of reach of suicidal individuals.

A Customer was back, and this time he meant illiterate business:

I have the utmost respect for Albert Camus, but this is dribble.

Drivel, surely!

26 out of 529 reviewers felt strange, perhaps even existentially so, after reading this book.

Self-doubting Critic:

Terrible Existentalistic Trash! Ugh,worst book EVER., June 15, 1998

By A Customer

Camus’ little novel about a nihilistic nobody who sheds no tears over the death of his haggy old mother, does boring things and commits a murder.  That’s the plot. Gee, I hated this book.  Hated it.  The main character’s behaviour and atheistic beliefs slightly offended me.  Don’t waste your time on this.  Read Ionesco’s ‘Four Plays’ instead. Then again, I might be wrong.  After all, a critic’s review is based solely upon his or hers personal opinion.  It could be a wonderful novel, but not bloody likely.  All I know is that at the end I was glad to see the malicous little bugger executed.

Suggest Post-reading Uses:

Used it as kitty-litter for my cat, April 26, 1999

By A Customer

This book was bad. I read this book when I was in grade 10 and it was very depressing. I probably was not old enought to appreciate the book or the content in it but i was aware of how i felt after reading it and wanted to burn it…[edited]

Burn after reading?

Don’t bother., December 12, 2007

By	Mary Mangan (Tallahassee, FL USA) – See all my reviews

I hated, hated, hated this book. It came highly recommended and I voluntarily (and rather enthusiastically) picked it up. There has never been a main character I have been more disgusted by, a storyline that has been less interesting, and a writing style that has been more obnoxious. I would burn it if it weren’t borrowed.

Toilet talk +verbal “baubles” = a long and satisfying book dump:

A novelette for the toilet., February 28, 2000

By	Hairy Growler (Alexandria, VA United States) – See all my reviews

This book is short. It’s simplistic. This book would make excellent toilet reading if only one could resist the persistent urge to drop it between one’s thighs.

When reading a novel, a good indication that you are insensitive to art is if you overemphasize the themes, or ideas. Art is not concerned with WHAT is said, so much as HOW and HOW WELL it is said. From an artistic perspective, the style and execution are what count—not the subject matter. And so, the literary, or artistic, value of this book and its philosophical value are two separate issues.

While I understand its emotional appeal to adolescents, I never found existential philosophy (`a la Camus and Sartre) to be very appealing on an intellectual level; and, I find fictionalized walk-throughs of philosophical ideas to be dreary without exception. Real artists do not generalize human experiences and reduce them to vague, overdrawn abstractions. And so, I would object to this book if it preoccupied itself with philosophical ideas; but, there is nothing as concrete or thoughtful as an idea in this book. Still, the characters are contrived, forced to act out Camus’ whimsical “existential” formulas like stiff-jointed marionettes in the hands of a club-fisted puppeteer.

From an artistic perspective: the plot is impossibly dumb; the structure is a trivial linear progression of (non)events; the characterization is almost entirely absent, and the characters are uniformly vacuous and wooden; the settings are barely even sketched; the narrative style is that of a mildly retarded six-year-old; the descriptions are banal and monochromatic; and, the dialogue is imbecilic. This book isn’t even bad literature—it is perfectly inartistic! …

While I’m profoundly indifferent to this book, I recommend it to professors of litterature and philosophistry, and to others who splash around in the shallow end of the intellectual pool and pepper their conversation with verbal baubles like “abyss”, “void”, “Nothingness”, “absurd”, and similar gibberish.  If you fall into this category but want to be cured, start by studying “Lectures on Literature” and “Lectures on Russian Literature”, both by Vladimir Nabokov…

splash…flush…

[edited]

And the Brainslop Gold Star Award for referencing Pamela Anderson and wolverines in a Camus review goes to…

SO overrated, September 26, 2007

By	Patricia E. Wehner (Atlanta, GA) – See all my reviews

This is a top contender for the worst book ever written. I thought about giving it a tied position with Pamela Anderson’s _Star_, but upon reflection I have decided that I would rather read _Star_ again than read _The Stranger_ again, although I would rather be eaten alive by rabid wolverines than do either. This book is so bad that it is painful for me to read it. If I had a time machine, I would pay to have Camus beaten to death on a deserted beach, ultimately preventing this disaster from ever coming into existence.

Gravity’s Painbow by Thomas Pynchon

Counter-culture wünderkind Thomas Pynchon dropped the ultimate slab of crypto-fiction paranoia with his third novel, Gravity’s Rainbow.  Geeks and Poindexters still salivate over the parabola of thermodynamics, postmodernism and pop culture weaved through the work.

Amazon’s 1-star brigade, however, feel rather differently about the book’s complexity.  “Literary masturbation” is A Customer’s choice epithet, joining  “obscure and disjointed”, “esoteric and arrogant” and the simpler but no less powerful “yuck”.

A Customer, like many other critics, lays blame squarely on the era in which it was written:

This book’s failings are in part a function of it’s time — the early 70’s – when culture was naively experimental, half-baked, vulgar, and exhibitionist.

38 out of 273 reviewers found no pot of gold at the end of this rainbow.

Best insult in a title:

Pynchon is a pretentious blowhard, September 10, 1999

By	Bill Ravdin (ravdin@yahoo.com) (Oakland, CA) – See all my reviews

Best anecdote and Spike simile:

The Emperor has no clothes, December 14, 1998

By A Customer

[edited]

After I finished reading this book twenty years ago, I left it in my apartment building’s laundry room for whomever might be interested in it. The book sat there for months and nobody was interested in it enough to take it home. Finally, it was ruined when a water pipe burst and, I presume, it is now landfill in Staten Island.

…

Pynchon is like a high school football bully who says “Okay, I’m gonna trow da ball as hard as I can–you see if you can catch it”.

No thanks Spike.

Pynchon desperately wants to impress us with his strength, wants to show off for us. The more you examine Gravity’s Rainbow, the less you find. Why? Because there is nothing there. Pynchon’s cleverness is in not standing for anything identifiable. This book is hundred of words that add up to nothing. Gravity’s Rainbow is ultimately as profound as all the doughnut holes in the world combined—ZERO.

Life is too short to read intellectually vain junk like Gravity’s Rainbow.

This book did teach me one valuable thing, however. I learned to be much more discriminating in my selection of reading material.

D. Olney

Una-bummed out by poor syntax:

Pynchon uses incorrect grammar in this bloated nonsense, September 11, 1999

By A Customer

Any author who uses “further” for “farther” (as Pynchon does, among many other errors) should never make anyone’s “best novelist” list. This novel might appeal to the many readers out there whose brains have been so modified by years of pot smoking that paranoiac plots of Titanic proportions are as readily accepted (and cherished) as that tattered Grateful Dead poster still hanging their bedroom wall. For the rest of us, who can see clearly through the thick marijuana fumes that others have so extravagantly exhaled for two generations, “Gravity’s Rainbow” seems childish. To this reader, Pynchon sounds like the unabomber with a better thesaurus. Tedious. … [edited]

Best mixed simile in a title:

AS FAR FETCHED AS WATCHING PAINT DRIES, March 21, 2006

By	Heidi (professional bookseller) (San Diego, CA) – See all my reviews

That Morning After feeling:

Don’t bother, June 8, 1998

By	Carl L. Oberg (Alexandria, VA USA) – See all my reviews

400 characters and too many thoughts later I felt empty and used. Look, I’ve read Finnegan’s Wake and I was confused and angry during “Gravity’s Rainbow.” ‘Nuff said.

Erectile Dysfunction:

Offensive Trash, November 11, 2003

By	vincent vega (Paris, France) – See all my reviews

An entire novel centered on the unrealistic, flimsy idea that a man getting erections will attract missiles? Some missiles may be heat seaking but the temperature of blood found in the groin during erections is no longer near the degree it takes to attract heat seaking weaponry. Get your facts right, Pynchon. A scientist you ain’t. As for the books social commentary on a whole, I can say this: I have not read the book, but I watched the film, and to be blunt, I’ve seen better film on teeth. Pick up a classic Steven King novel like IT instead of this pretentious crud.

And the Brainslop Gold Star Award for Public Service Critiquing goes to…

Confusion’s Dumpster, July 21, 2006

By	Book Dion – See all my reviews

I lived in Germany a few years ago and found this book in a train station. Someone had just walked off and left it. After about ten pages, realizing that Pynchon was an intellectual rip-off artist, I secured it a trash can where no one could find it. I like to think I protect the public from pollution.

And the Brainslop Gold Star Award for Best Original Metaphor in a review goes to…

Gravity’s Rainbow: I beg to differ, August 8, 1997 By PXF03652@niftyserve.or.jp – See all my reviews

[extract]
With its sidelines admiration of drugs and decadence, GR is a novel straight out of some 1970s nightmare. It uses slang (natch) to try to be hip-intellectual and then fires out frequent volleys of “facts” and “references” to cover its tracks. But ultimately I think you’d have to be pretty naive to fall for its patter. It’s just “Jitterbug Perfume” or any other Tom Robbins novel with a Phd. instead of a major in auto shop, a Jaguar instead of a Camaro, and a gold card instead of a pay packet. But it still wears the same nasty cologne and has the same fulsome desires. Tell it you’re not that kinda girl.

Naked Lunch: The Restored Vexed by William Burroughs

Plenty of spleen being vented in the Amazon.com 1-star reviews of William ‘Tell’ Burroughs’ Naked  Lunch – The Restored Text. As the ever popular A Customer puts it: It can be simply described as a junkie with homosexual tendencies who prattles on and on, thinking he’s interesting.

One of the hive mind of critics complained that the most interesting bits of Burroughs’s bio had been airbrushed out of the editor’s notes, like the fact he shot his wife in a re-enactment of the William Tell apple-balacing trick.  Others rail against his junky-ness and the irritating aspects of his so-called groundbreaking “cut’n'paste” approach to assembling a novel.  Mark Twain even turns up to put the boot in, in the world’s first posthumous literary kicking.  He seems to have become something of a staunch Republican, with little time for “liberal atheist Jesus-hating baby-killing scum”.

A Customer later came up with an ingenious simile:

Absolute, chemically induced nonsense, like listening to someone slam on a piano keyboard for twelve hours and then tell you that it’s not that they can’t play, they’re just interested in slamming on the keys.

31 out of 246 reviewers thought Naked Lunch was overexposed.

Bambi-fied Burroughs:

‘disney’ version of Naked Lunch, April 13, 2003

By A Customer

Bright marketing of a restored ‘William Burroughs.’

In this version of Naked Lunch, in the editors’ notes (one of the ‘editors’ is a former lover and adopted son of WSB), there’s no William shooting Joan Burroughs. Not a word about the murder that William said caused him to become a writer. Nothing. Not a hint.

Perhaps in the next version, William will be heterosexual?

The [price] is for about 50 new pages of information. The only bright part of the book–besides marketing the ‘restored’ non-killing William Burroughs –is that this version totally replaces William’s version (in print through about 40 editions–unchanged by William over about that many years), and will now be the only version available in the USA .
Now that is marketing–but not literature or history. Sad that Barry Miles seems to have made some devil’s deal–get your name on a famous book as editor–forget real history (Joan who?). Forget that William never even put Ginsberg’s or Kerouac’s names on his original version (they were the real editors).

What next, a Reader’s Digest version of On the Road? Howl without four-letter words? Amazing what greed will make some people do. Let’s hope that the estates of Kerouac and Ginsberg have more taste.

Keep your original Naked Lunch, William’s version. Buy all the copies of the original now–they may have a lot of value in the years to come.

Junky Junk:

Yawn…., August 23, 1998

By A Customer

Having occasionally shared neighborhoods with junkies, I have always been amazed by how thoroughly uninteresting their lives are. This book confirms my view. It works really hard to make lives of junkies literary interesting, but fails since the material that the author works with is intrinsically dull. One cannot but help shedding a tear for all the trees that has been wasted making this all too thick book.

(A disclaimer: If this book picks up in the second half I may be a bit unfair. Somehow I seriously doubt it. Particullarily because of the cutting technique that has been so much better applied elsewhere)

“I Blame The Liberal Feminist Homesexual Atheists” Review:

NOT LITERATURE!!!! (ZERO STARS!!!!!), September 15, 2008

By	Mark Twain (A Place) – See all my reviews

1 of 27 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars NOT LITERATURE!!!! (ZERO STARS!!!!!), September 15, 2008
By Mark Twain (A Place) – See all my reviews
This is not literature so much as a LIBERAL ATHEIST’S heroin laced premonition in the 1950’s of all books having (sadly) been approved by the authorities here in the present, and my opinion of the author’s own serious problems is way beyond me. And it is just like some JESUS HATING BABY KILLING SCUM like a “BEAT” or a “HIPPY” or a “PUNK ROCKER” or people reading this book and giving it to their children to read and read again which is like some kind of cult, reading literature, and trying not to be READING THE BIBLE AGAIN AND PUTTING THE BIBLE ASIDE FOR EVERY OTHER BOOK OF OUR OWN CULTURE’S SO-CALLED DEFICIENCES!!! It is absurd, or the FUTURE. WHO reads this and resonates with this such that it is “naked” truth, or the “Naked lunch” to them?!!! Only a LIBERAL, or a “UNITARIAN” or a “DEMOCRAT FEMINEST” (Rotting Goddess: The Origins of the Witch in Classical Antiquity)!!!! I mean, who are these people putting it in the schools’ tap-water and in the public libraries for other people’s children to try to DESTROY AMERICA? PEOPLE NEED TO STOP THINKING AND REALIZE THAT THE BIBLE IS ALL WE NEED NOT SOME HOMOSEXUALIST-ATHEIST TRASH!!!

I mean

This is not literature so much as an LIBERAL ATHEIST’S heroin laced interpretation of our culture’s so-called deficiëncies. It is absurd that this book has been approved in by the authorities here in the present, or the future. WHO reads this and resonates with the opinion of the author’s own serious problems is beyond me. And it is this that is “naked” truth, or the “Naked lunch”? Only to a LIBERAL JESUS HATING BABY EATING SCUM like a “BEAT” or a “HIPPY” or a “PUNK ROCKER” or a “LIBERAL” or a “UNITARIAN” (Blood on the Altar: The Secret History of the World’s Most Dangerous Secret Society)!!!! I mean, who are these people reading this book and giving it to their children to read and putting it in the schools/public libraries for other people’s children to read?!!! It is like some kind of cult which is reading literature, thus trying to DESTROY AMERICA. PEOPLE NEED TO START THINKING AND READING THE BIBLE AGAIN AND PUT ASIDE EVERY OTHER BOOK!!!! THE BIBLE IS ALL WE NEED NOT SOME HOMOSEXUALATHEIST TRASH!!!

I mean

This is not literature so much as a LIBERAL ATHEIST’S deficiëncies. It is absurd that this book has been approved. WHO reads this and resonates with the opinion of the author’s that it is the “naked” truth, or the “Naked lunch”? Only to a LIBERAL “PUNK ROCKER” or a so-called “UNITARIAN” or a “LIBERAL”!!!! I mean, who are these people reading and putting it in the schools/public libraries for other people’s children. They are people who are only interested in reading literature, thus trying to DESTROY AMERICA AGAIN WHILE PUTTING ASIDE EVERY OTHER BOOK LIKE THE BIBLE!!!! It is an ATHEIST’S heroin laced interpretation of our so-called culture’s authorities here in the present. Our countries own future serious problems are beyond belife (Rotting Face: Smallpox and the American Indian). It is these LIBERAL JESUS HATING SCUM, KILLING AND EATING BABIES like some “BEATS” or “HIPPYS” who are reading this book and giving it to their children to read. It is like some kind of cult which is reading literature. PEOPLE NEED TO STOP THINKING AND START READING THE BIBLE AGAIN INSTEAD!! THE BIBLE IS ALL WE NEED NOT SOME HOMOSEXUALISTATHEIST TRASH!!!

And what is it with this so-called “CUT-UP” business? That is not allowed. That is not good writing. Ask any ENGLISH teacher (as opposed to any gobbeldy-gook teacher) and he will tell you that it is not legitimate. You cant do that!!! I cant write a paper and then tear it up into bits and then rearrange the bits and then tape them back together and then turn it in and then expect that the teacher will then accept it!!!

And the Brainslop Gold Star Award for Understated Self-Aware Critiquing goes to…

…., September 12, 2002

By	Matthew G. Wauck (Willy Penn’s Forest) – See all my reviews

Don’t even waste your time with this book, much like I am now in the process of writing this review.

Use it as kindling.

Finnegan’s Brainache by James Joyce

James Joyce’s follow-up to Ulysses, Finnegan’s Wake inspires splenetic loathing and accusations of pretensious drivel, gobbledigook and utter gibberish from the hive mind of Amazon.com.  Did a drunken Joyce just bash his fists on the typewriter like a confused child, or was he pushing the limits of literature to its, er, limits?

As Douglas “Douglas” so memorably puts it: I can’t imagine being the person who had to proof-read this drivel, I would sooner plunge my hand into a vat of boiling oil.

A devisive tome, then.

49 out of 200 Amazon reviewers could not be woken by Joyce’s lexical gymnastics.

Best Review Title:

19 of 28 people found the following review helpful:

Belongs in an anthology of abnormal psychiatry, July 22, 2000

By A Customer

This reviewer is unwell:

20 of 40 people found the following review helpful:

this book rocks!!!, July 30, 2003

By A Customer

True, Joyce’s many masterpieced work of profound interjectional superiority has at last brought the final jigsaw piece to this unChristianly magnifique port-en-tois ouevre…

But that’s why it’s sooooooo good?!

Hello, my name is Rajish. I am an 8th rank student from The Calcutta Institute of Fine Literary Works. Tonight, we will take a journey of unprecedented backwardness and desolution. When I was 4 years old, my friend and I went to the local book shop to buy our first copies of Finnegan’s Wake (FW as we affectionately called it). When we came home we read our copy of FW with the greatest of zeal and devoured the conduit imagery and allusion in this densely conceived and lightly told work. The effect, of one who studies it as my friend and I do, is of entrancement and utmost vermisiltude. By the end, we feel so lost and alone, so dissapointed by literature and its pseudo-world of false authoritarianism, we vow to never read again. Except for Eddy Said that is. Please read this book and join us postcolonially. Peace.

Alterative Take:

10 of 26 people found the following review helpful:

Kind of light and fluffy., March 21, 2000

By	Jun-Dai Bates (San Francisco, CA United States) – See all my reviews

This book is very entertaining, and has maddening pace, kind of like the Matrix. In fact this book is a lot like the Matrix. It’s about as complicated as The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon. I take dumps more dense than this. Reading this book will take about and hour and a half, though it will only feel like 20 minutes. Think Curious George. I can’t wait for the movie (I hope Spielberg directs it, and finishes the last sentence).

Succinctity:

8 of 64 people found the following review helpful:

Meaningless gibberish, March 13, 2004

By	David Gulbraa (Costa Mesa, CA USA) – See all my reviews

There is nothing worse than an illiterate writer.

And the Brainslop Gold Star Award for Comedic Critiquing goes to…

20 of 25 people found the following review helpful:

an unusual writing technique, May 5, 2005

By	Freston (USA) – See all my reviews

Joyce was quite understandably frustrated when his magnum opus, “Ulysses,” did not immediately receive the critical attention he felt it warranted upon its publication in 1922.

Thus it was that the artist, while composing his next work, “Finnegan’s Wake,” got into the habit of periodically banging his head against the typewriter keys, a poignant expression, obviously, of the searing torment boiling within him.

Happily for us, the result of these repeated cranial collisions can be viewed in the contents of this volume.

Underworld: A Doorstop by Don Delillo

This 800-page slab has seen some serious seething over at Amazon, where the One Star Rangers have been nothing less than ingenious in their bile.  A massively verbose, excessively pretentious piece of “high literature” interlarding baseball, JFK and the atom bomb, and striving so hard for Great American Novel status that it forgot its duty to tell an interesting story fleshed out with three-dimensional characters along the way.  Woops.  One customer put it thus: It lacks a clear focus and drags you from chapter to chapter like a dental pick. Ouch!

46 Amazon reviewers out of 327 said Don Delill-NO!

Self-doubting:

3 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

I must not be smart…, May 1, 1998

By	mlauchlan@home.com (Foothill Ranch, Ca) – See all my reviews

I found this to be the most boring book. In fact, I gave up at page 224. Perhaps it really took off on page 225, but by that point I was already brain dead. My neighbor Terri made it all the way through. I am not sure how many months that took, but she is a stud. By the way her husband Tom made it all the way to page 300. Apparently, everyone on our street is just stupid to understand this great literary masterpiece. Anyone got any extra copies of Daniel Steele.

Novel as Emetic:

1 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

Syrup of Ipecac is Cheaper, November 30, 1998

By	ars12@uclink4.berkeley.edu (Berkeley, CA)

DeLillo is a shallow genius. He often makes witty observations and quips and attempts to assemble these (in Underworld using the pathetic motif of baseball as his “glue”) into a coherent novel. He fails, as he did in White Noise and Libra.

Unfortunately DeLillo, the unabashed postmodernist, substitutes superficiality in character, plot, and trivializes the novel as an artform while garnering reviews from hungry critics desperate for anything palatable. For them any food tastes good (look at Grisham, Clancy, King etc, gawdawful) as they are very hungry.

This made me vomit. Go check out some ipecac if you want to induce vomiting, it’s much cheaper.

Abstruse Zen-like statement:

Embarassing, August 3, 1999

By A Customer

Were we really like this

Uncle Elmer:

17 of 34 people found the following review helpful:

Wow! Boy was I impressed and so is uncle Elmer, November 16, 2003

By	“tiseye” (new york city) – See all my reviews

Sorry, forgot the question mark.

I have an uncle Elmer. He is a family amusement. When I was a young man he used to come to family reunions,funerals and weddings and be quite entertaining. He was most famous for learning a new word from the dictionary each day or a new theory or concept he would vaguely touch upon and share with the younger members.

“So whatcha think about the theory of real-tivity?”, Uncle Elmer would pose. Or, “do any of you youngins know what a simulacrum is..hey you over there, Billy, ya know what a simulacrum is?”

We were all as very young children quite impressed with Uncle Elmer — quite impressed. Well that is of course until we got older and could see through sad uncle Elmer.

We learned uncle Elmer was trying to impress us with this way-with-words and knowledge of the most obscure facts. We learned that he would play with those words, dance with his stories just to mesmerize, to impress, to sound “smart”.

How wonderful it would have been for all of us, but mostly for Uncle Elmer, had there been any real “point” or “substance” in his offering.

However,uncle Elmer was an innocent — insecure and uneducated, but harmless. That is not the case with Mr. Delillo. His wordplay and pretention is a black mark on literature and a damaging offer to those impressed with the uncle Elmers of this world and impressed with this gibberish!

And that is the end of my very sad review.

And the Brainslop Gold Star Award for Comedic Critiquing goes to…

72 of 103 people found the following review helpful:

A book about waste and time, January 24, 2001

By	Seb “otherseb” (London, England) – See all my reviews

A year it had dozed on my shelf or on my floor, grey-grey, consuming the immediate space to its left and to its right. Briefly halting the steady-Eddie scan of my eye – from left to right or from right to left – from time to time.

It was eight hundred and twenty seven pages long.

I read it on the bus or on the train or at my desk with a white plastic coffee cup. Number 53. Strong. Douwe Egberts. White with sugar. The woman from the other desk asked me what I was reading and said is it any good and said we are going to have lunch and said do you want to come?

It was eight hundred and twenty seven pages long with seven hundred and eighty one pages of character introduction.

The woman from the other desk was from Peru, Indiana. And she lived in what she called an `affordable’ bungalow’ with a man who she said was her `dear other half’. His first name was a name that was Jules or Julian or Julius. He was an electrical engineer and maybe I’ll write a bit about his mother and the nun who taught him to read at school. She really has nothing to do with anything but it would make me a clever and interesting writer – a storytelling genius, in fact – and so would repeating random little sections of text and willful placing of the word `and’.

It was eight hundred and twenty seven pages long with seven hundred and eighty one pages of character introduction. And after those seven hundred and eighty one pages were finished I simply didn’t care about the characters.

I looked out of my dusty-musty window and I had to force myself to read on. And the ending?

Peace.