An embress of textistence and embiddyment aflight
[…] the nature of the book means that there will be two types of reviews of it. The first type will come from comics and geek-culture websites, whose reviewers have rarely read anything more taxing than X-Men: God Loves, Man Kills. A 1200+-page literary novel is, pretty much by definition, going to overwhelm them, and they’ll say so.
The other type of reviewer is the writer for the arts pages of the broadsheets, and they will compare it to books like Infinite Jest, Gravity’s Rainbow, Lanark. They’ll mention the chapter written in the style of Finnegans Wake. They won’t say “this is a big, hard, book” explicitly, but they’ll only refer to it in the context of famously-difficult works.
The fact is that Jerusalem does merit comparison with all those other books — like them it is a monstrously clever, awe-inspiring book, an omnium gatherum that uses different literary styles and genres, that ties together all the author’s thoughts in one massive explanatory, exploratory, novel.
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