Oh Michiko Kakutani!

How I wish that, someday, I can write a two-sentence lede as scathing as yours:

"Thomas Pynchon’s new novel, 'Against the Day,' reads like the sort of imitation of a Thomas Pynchon novel that a dogged but ungainly fan of this author’s might have written on quaaludes. It is a humongous, bloated jigsaw puzzle of a story, pretentious without being provocative, elliptical without being illuminating, complicated without being rewardingly complex."

Awesome!