Negative Positive
Title: An unruly self-important novel
Review: Whence all the 5 star reviews? One of the great political thrillers? Seriously? A cross between Malcolm Lowry and Dostoyevsky? I must have missed something. Stone is capable of some very fine writing, for sure. He's also capable of some very incoherent writing. And if the incoherence was meant to serve as a metaphor for the incoherence of history or of American foreign policy or of anything else, then it's a metaphor that fell flat early on in this very very over-long novel. I've read many a so-called great novel that was richly deserving of the moniker. This one struck me, after the first 200 pretty compelling pages or so (hence my second star), as a bore from then on. A long, painfully slow, and highly pretentious bore. I couldn't wait to be done with it.
Is the review positive or negative? 