So now I walk away thinking, here's someone who writes about sex less compellingly than they can write about a literal yawn. His website background looks like this and the quoted review says: ""Victoria" follows Cosmo Cowperhwait the inventor of a human-amphibian hybrid that bares an uncanny resemblance to Her Majesty, Queen Victoria, as well as an insatiable sexual appetite." This is one of those cases where I wouldn't even have cared about the flaws if its best moments hadn't held so much promise. So, I go to Wikipedia to check out the other accolades Little, Big has received besides Harold Bloom's, and the next one I see is from this guy. Too self-congratulatory without being natural enough to seem authentic. Then he hits us with Auberon letting her sleep with other guys "as long as, when you're with me, you're with me" and look, I could happily read a story about this kind of dynamic, but what's here is a single paragraph that serves no purpose except to say "look how progressive my story is." Now, not only am I being turned off by sections Crowley is writing like he has all the faith in the world are going to turn me on, I'm comparing Crowley to the kind of dude that would write a poem about how feminist he is so he can go wink at the girls at his reading of it. I could deal with their story fading to the background as the generations proceed, but once the spotlight is on Auberon and Sylvie, I just couldn't stomach another paragraph about her panties or magical brown Puerto Rican skin. I found the relationship that the novel opened with charming and maturely written.
But then I gave up and just felt annoyed I'd even gone that far.
The style alone propelled me about 75% of the way through the whole book. However, I'm unable to comment on whether the zigzagging plot coalesces into anything coherent by the end. Crowley approaches this in the best parts of Little, Big-here's someone who can write about a child yawning for the first time in a way that leaves me wide-eyed until it dawns on me what it is that's being described.
"Style over substance" is widely understood to be a criticism, yet some artists can chisel out a style so precisely that it becomes substance itself.
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