Selections from One-Star Amazon Reviews of Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49

[Editorial note: The following citations come from one-star Amazon reviews of Thomas Pynchon’s novel The Crying of Lot 49. To be clear, I’m a big Pynchon fan. I’ve preserved the reviewers’ own styles of punctuation and spelling. More one-star Amazon reviews].

---

If it were better written, it might qualify as pretentious.

the prose was simultaneously confusing and boring

my first Pynchon novel and probably my last

I am really picky when it comes to reading.

I suppose if you like post modernist crap?

This novel just did not do it for me.

Opaque, muddled, and mindless.

Yuck! Had to read for class. :-(

the characters were unlikable

Reading shouldn’t be work…

If you’re an English major

What is this I don’t even

I didn’t finish it

insufferable

convoluted

No thanks.

overly complicated

gacked-up cartoon of a…thing

stupidest thing I’ve ever read

left confused about many things

deliberate manipulation of names

palpably viscerally nauseated and sick

Pynchon and Robbins can just go and get a room.

I love A LOT of post-modern experimental fiction, but

I managed to finish this novel only because it’s short

This is really the worst book I have ever read

loaded with pretentious intellectualism

I find the weirdness too weird

required too much effort

A Silly Word Salad

wacky hi-jinks

post-beatnik weirdoes

difficult, delirious writing style

pretentious intellectualism posing as literature

like Sacha Baron Cohen of the dreadful movie “Borat” fame

(modern life is uncertain; there is no guarantee of a happy ending)

Pynchon is a sad man with a rather warped and gloomy view of the world

a prose style that is going to either delight or dismay most readers

physics, Greek tragedies, postal history, drug culture

is bizarre like the author is high when he wrote it

hyperstylized game of literary three card monte

I was expecting a Victorian crime drama

nothing to interest a decent reader

he really should find a day job

the character names; silly

without the humor

Thankfully brief

chaos engine