Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

I really wanted to like this novel, which was recommended to me by a friend. What it is, however, is two hundred pages plus of pretentious, adolescent ramblings delivered by two narrators, a middle-aged concierge "autodidact," and an self-described "hyper-intelligent" adolescent, each of whom announces at the outset that she is morally and intellectually superior to the other human beings -- adults, adolescents and children -- in her respective world within the apartment house in which all the characters in the novel reside. All of these family members, neighbors and friends -- except, of course, for a working-class maid -- are rich, spoiled, phony, stupid, superficial . . . . well, you get the picture. The dogs and cats come off well, probably because they can't go shopping. Ah, the tedium of the bourgeoisie! The torture of having to hide your exceptional talents and exquisite sensibility from mediocre people who would never appreciate such rare gifts; nay, who would punish you for being special. Such ordinary mortals could not share those special moments with Leo, Levin and Kitty (that's Tolstoy and the main characters in "Anna Karenina," folks -- just in case you aren't among the "elect"), or read Japanese comic books in the original. As Holden Caulfield would have said, -- "What a load of crap." When the Japanese sage walked in -- with his decorator, no less, who stripped the haute bourgeoisie apartment of a dead food critic of all its rich person frou-frou, creating instead a high-end ashram -- I was ready to, as Holden might have said, "Puke." Of course, Obi-Wan Kenobe sees through everyone's pose right away, feeding the concierge pickled veggies and sushi; unlocking the hearts of our over-enlightened, undernourished heroines, who are able, for the first time, to form close relationships with others -- one another, of course (not counting the dog, cats and Obi-Wan) -- and thereby to discover the meaning of "life." Guess what happens next? Reader, I won't tell you. But if you are not enmeshed in the same web of self-indulgent, narcissistic adolescent fantasy as are the so-called characters of this alleged novel (which is really a collection of assertions -- god forbid I should call them meditations -- about "art," "life," and how crummy your parents are) -- you will have guessed the trendy post-modernist denouement by page 5. ("Is there a 'subject'?" asked Foucault; "What is an author?" I pondered these weighty -- with pretention, because they are ultimately trite -- questions as I placed "The Elegance of the Hedgehog" in my "Donate to the library a.s.a.p." pile.) I rarely write reviews for books that I strongly dislike; I figure, "live and let live" -- but this time, I am making an exception. "Caveat Emptor" -- Buyer beware.