Negative Positive
Title: brutal going
Review: there's no music, as it were, in what a.s. byatt does: i have read three of her novels now and i'm, i think, in a pretty good position to judge her stuff as utterly pretentious and banal. read just one page of hers and compare it to a paragraph (a single sentence?!) of James Joyce. i am an english prof--hence all the lit allusions in this novel just kinda made me sick. she drops so many names/quotations you need an imaginary broom to sweep them away. dreadful dreck. you need something Englishy to read--investigate William Boyd or Julian Barnes. byatt is like a parody of good writing. only salman rushdie's fiction is more onanistic (though his criticism's pretty cool). byatt is the literary equivalent of Stevie Nicks! Icky!!!!
Is the review positive or negative? 