These highly charged and politicized arguments about the evils of late capitalism transform Devil’s Contract from a work of cultural history into something close to a polemic, one with which you may or may not agree. Simon’s style, moreover, can sometimes veer into the over-emphatic ... Still, these cavils aside, Devil’s Contract reminds us of how often we deludedly exchange something of inestimable value... for what is ultimately glittery trash.
Provocative, if clunky ... Mr. Simon is at his most inventive when he links Faustian tradeoffs with a panoply of real events and figures ... I commend his passion while remaining skeptical of his patronizing tone and excess of references.
One might wish for it to be expressed through slightly less heated rhetoric and a more limited focus ... Scholarly and impassioned if sometimes hysterical.
Lively ... Simon... tends to see the Faustian myth as more liberatory than punitive. He enjoys its heresies and dangers, its madcap adventures, the magical-realist wildness; and, since he has read extremely widely, he relishes sharing all of that narrative wealth with his lucky readers.
Simon’s impassioned — one might almost say possessed — approach to his story results in a lot of overheated, sloppy writing ... Still, his tone is sincere, and insights and interesting tidbits occasionally emerge amid all the surface bluster.
