MixedThe BafflerParadise Logic’s project tends to come into focus only when Reality is actively having sex with Ariel ... Any will to truth Paradise Logic might have possessed dissipates into nihilist absurdity that is unconvincingly tethered to the rest of the novel ... The book outright refuses to stick the landing, collapsing its insights into a dated and unfunny millennialism. ... A superficial exercise in aesthetic infelicity that refuses narrative accountability, inundating readers with doodles and the plodding narration of a singularly unlikeable protagonist to no real end ... If it invited more serious contemplation, I would wonder whether saddling a low-IQ protagonist like Reality with the Truth of Gender Experience, reducing it to a hazy thesis about the existential impossibility of fulfilling straight relationships, and then abandoning the entire project so lazily was outright hostile to female readers like myself, if not womankind writ large.
