PositiveEWA staccato prose poem to New York by novelist Whitehead, Colossus thrums with anxious excitement and excited anxiety, accommodating the noirish, the reportorial, and the epigrammatic ... The best passages deserve comparison with E.B. White’s Here Is New York; the worst are small marvels of cryptic nonsense ... Still, Whitehead’s deft sketches of the peculiarities of cocktail parties and subway platforms offer tingles of fond feeling.
Thomas Pynchon
PositiveSlate...a genre-drunk, ganja-fried study of place and paranoid mood, with a certain ceiling on its explorations of character, a lovely unconcern for those snoots who find its meta-pop sensibilities lacking, and down the home stretch a laggardly quality as the narrative threads of its shaggy-dog subplots get matted. But it strikes me as a necessary novel and one that literary history has been waiting for, ever since it went to bed early on innocent Sept. 10 with a copy of The Corrections and stayed up well past midnight reading Franzen into the wee hours of his novel’s publication day … His view of the tech world is captivating. Though he doesn’t attempt any grand-scale Balzacian social analysis of Silicon Alley, he gives the full Fitzgerald swoon to passages describing the ritual sacrifice of innocence on the altar of IPO ambition and also to a dot-com party that unfolds on Saturday, Sept. 8.
Michael Chabon
PositiveEntertainment WeeklyChabon’s got an eye for the spine-tingling image and a near-perfect ear … Chabon, who has researched this novel assiduously, is sometimes too eager to show his work. He distracts us from his own performance with a few superfluous flourishes … These are complaints about a writer whose unevenness seems inextricable from his undeniable brilliance. Kavalier and Clay is over 600 pages long, but it’s not an epic novel. Rather, it’s a long, lyrical one that’s exquisitely patterned rather than grandly plotted, composed with detailed scenes, and spotted with some rapturous passages of analysis and others that give lavish accounts of superheroic derring-do. The book is, in a sophisticated way, comic-bookish.
