Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

I do not agree with Nancy Pearl (understatement). I think she is completely wrong-headed in her reasons for disinterring this book from its well-deserved out-of-print status, and my prediction is that will once again achieve such status, never, one can only hope, to be resuscitated evermore. The adjectives I think best-employed to describe the soul-sapping trudge through a life, and death, that constitutes this book are dispiriting and boring. It is the only novel I have ever read where the parts I underlined were, almost to a one, quotes from other authors that the now clapped-out former child prodigy narrator, Joshua Bland, dictates into his reel-to-reel tape recorder in the drug-hazed narration of his life. Ms. Perle lauds the book for its "snark." And if it's snark upon snark for which a prospective reader hunts, s/he will find the creature here, in abundance. But a novel cannot subsist, as this one, for the most part, tries to do, on snark alone. Ms. Perle also states that there are those poor readers who will simply not understand our narrator's self-loathing and self-destructive behaviour. Not a bit of it! The problem with the book or, I should say, another problem with it, is that it is TOO understandable. Man/woman is born. S/he suffers. S/he dies. Do we really need 500+ pages of narration to elaborate upon this fact without nuance, without poetry, without subtlety, but with ironic snark alone? The only book which comes to mind with which to compare this one is the even longer, even more snarky Laura Warholic by Alexander Theroux, in which even more authors are quoted, even more erudition on display and even more unleavened venom against the human condition forced into the reader's veins. Prospective reader: Life is short, too short to waste upon over five-hundred pages stuffed with bilious, insipid bemoanings of one's outcast state. We all bemoan our state from time to time, but to cast such bemoanings into something new and original, into tragic art, requires the genius of a Shakespeare or of a Shelley or of a Nietzsche. Mr. Miller is not in their company. Unlike in Lewis Carroll's poem, it's easy to catch a snark in this novel: Just close your heart.