Michiko Kakutani Disses John Banville

A Wordy Widower With a Past - New York Times:

nstead, the judges last month awarded the prize to John Banville’s novel “The Sea” - a stilted, claustrophobic and numbingly pretentious tale about an aging widower revisiting his past.
…
Mr. Banville - the author of such earlier novels as “Kepler,” “The Book of Evidence” and “Ghosts” - has always been a highly cerebral author who emphasizes style over story, linguistic pyrotechnics over felt emotion. His novels have tended to be willfully lapidary works, filled with dense, pictorial descriptions and recondite words and allusions: think of a self-conscious attempt to wed Joyce to Nabokov to Wim Wenders.

“The Sea” is no exception: it’s a book that traps the reader inside the gloomy, narcissistic mind of its narrator, Max, subjecting us to his tendentious thoughts on everything from freckles to women’s feet to the philosophical “otherness of other people.”

…

it remains, in the end, a chilly, dessicated and pompously written book that stands in sharp contrast to the vibrancy of many of this year’s other Booker nominees.

Ouch. Shoulda stuck with MY LIFE by Bill Clinton.

Now this is a highly cost-effective review, telling readers don’t bother with this book even if it won the prestigious Booker Prize.

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