Charles Baxter takes down John Irving in the New York Review of Books:
But the pitfalls of a novel constructed largely through plot are also on display: the characters and their construction here are schematic, as if written to and for a thesis that requires them to be dropped into slots. We are repeatedly clobbered by revelations that everybody is somebody else, so that the final revelation about the beautifully muscled and godlike Kittredge turns out to be no surprise at all. To misuse a word from psychoanalysis, the characterizations that Irving employs are overdetermined, with the result that the events of the story collaborate with the intentions of the author. You can see certain turns of the plot coming from twenty pages away—or farther, from below the horizon. At no juncture does anything happen that conflicts with the general themes; every scene feels like an exemplum designed for an uplifting book club discussion in which there will be few arguments.
