What's so disappointing about 1Q84 is that while it's far more complicated than Murakami's previous books, it doesn't extend or deepen ideas and themes from them, and even seems like a pale reflection of his earlier work. For one thing, there's the staggering length of the entire book, 932 pages. The length is not suited to a writer of Murakami's fragile gifts, though he very nearly pulled it off with The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle (1997), which ran 624 pages. With its two main story lines, which alternate chapter by chapter, and its aimless plots about religious cults, female assassins, a 17-year-old girl who writes a best selling novel, and whimsical creatures called "the little people," 1Q84 has a kind of doughy amorphousness that is less like the Kafka and Proust mentioned by many critics than Kurt Vonnegut (and whatever his shortcomings, Vonnegut never attempted a 900-plus page novel).

It's hard to believe that some of the critics praising 1Q84 didn't really feel, at times, like throwing the book in the air and walking away. Trying to say anything definite about it is like trying to nail Jell-O to a wall. (Even the title's allusion to Orwell seems vague.) It's an elaborate puzzle in which the pieces seem to change shape just as you try to fit them into place or a puzzle which, when assembled, adds up to a picture of a perfect blank. For me, reading it was the literary equivalent of biting into a large, pumped-up soufflé. After finishing five pounds of book, I was still hungry—for a novel.

Were there other critics out there who felt as I did? Looking through the reviews, I found some brave dissenters. In the November 9 New York Times, Janet Maslin expressed sympathy for readers "stuck in the quick sand of 1Q84. You, sucker, will wade through nearly one thousand uneventful pages ... 1Q84 has even his most ardent fans doing back flips as they try to justify this book's glaring troubles." In Time, Bryan Walsh identifies one of those troubles: "All the usual Murakami elements are there: the detached protagonist, the creepy authoritarian cult, the mysterious quest, the moments when the bizarre bleeds into the buttoned-up world of modern Japan. Yet too often the words simply lay there in the page ... This is a jazz solo that overstays its welcome." More to the point, perhaps, is Walsh's observation that missing from the novel is "Murakami himself. With 1Q84, the author decided for the first time in his career to fully abandon first-person narration, and the absence is felt ... remove Murakami from Murakami, and the magic vanishes."

One gets the feeling that critics who until recently were Murakami's cheerleaders are now, with 1Q84, becoming apologists. If the book continues to slide down the bestseller lists, and—horrors!—goes into remainders, will some critics revisit their first responses? And if so, will there be a critical backlash to Murakami's next work? As the Zen master says, we will see. Meanwhile, everyone might reflect on the pitfalls of treating novelists as if they were rock stars.

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