Title: Highly, highly overrated.
Product review: The reason so many professors of late 20th century fiction teach this book is the same reason that I feel that it's ultimately unsuccessful: it's a completely paint-by-the-numbers rehashing of an extrapolative social critique that's been done to death. That the narrative assumes that these observations are new to the reader indicates how pedestrian of a work it truly is. Its "content" allows professors to feel as if they're contributing to students' liberal education, yet its narrative structure is about as complex as that of an episode of "Father Knows Best," so no students complain about how hard it is to read. The wide praise this book has received as a great postmodern novel is completely undeserved, and is evidence of how simplistic a view academia takes toward modern fiction.
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