Nothing makes me less interested in discussing literature than being only a quarter of the way through a fatuous book that I feel obligated to finish.
(Especially when the book wants to be a contemporary answer to This Side of Paradise but lacks the romance, charm, curiosity, and specificity of place and time that lift Fitzgerald’s juvenilia above mere collegiate pomposity and navel-gazing.)
I’m sure I’ll be tempted on finishing the book to say more, but I defer to the wisdom and experience of Mark Twain, who once told Joseph Twichell:
I often want to criticise Jane Austen, but her books madden me so that I can’t conceal my frenzy from the reader; and therefore I have to stop every time I begin. Everytime I read ‘Pride and Prejudice’ I want to dig her up and beat her over the skull with her own shin-bone.