Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

It is not altogether puzzling that John Irving commended this novel: he and the author are good friends-- a fact Verghese notes in his acknowledgments and a fact that should have prohibited Irving from offering an ostensibly unbiased review of the novel in the first place. What is puzzling, however, is that everyone else, who I can only presume are not close friends of the author, seems to have been totally bamboozled by such poorly edited, excessively detailed, loosely plotted, uninspiring prose. The novel's scope is far too large, even for a novel of its size (and it is obese!), and it tries too hard, twisting and turning, to include every type of dramatic and often, given the context, unbelievable situation within one twin's life-- from murder to venereal disease, from revolution to organ transplant, from adoption to genital mutilation. There are too many characters, which wouldn't be so much of a problem for a novel of this size if so many of them weren't utterly pointless (that is, if the reader, and the story, wouldn't have noticed their absence in the slightest) and we weren't given so much unnecessary background information on all of them (especially toward the end). The medical detail provided over the course of the novel was long-winded and often confusing, especially for a layperson, and, what's worse, all of this irrelevant detail halted the story right when it got going, not furthering plot, characterization, suspense, or any other aspect of the novel that it could have in other, defter hands. It seems that Verghese, a physician, could not help but to provide any and all specifics related to every single medical procedure he decided to include in his novel, whether they were interesting, understandable, or illuminating (I've never encountered the word "pleura" or "pleural" so many times in my life). It's never an auspicious sign when a work of fiction ends with a bibliography, but this one does. Ultimately, all of the superfluous detail tried to stand in for, or to distract our attention away from, what the novel so obviously lacked-- good, plain storytelling-- and, had it all been surgically removed (like the infected liver so crucial to one of the novel's myriad climaxes and potential endings), the novel would have been half its size but twice as interesting. My only explanation for the popularity and positive reviews this book has received so far is that (especially white, middle-class) Americans are being struck by "Slumdog Millionaire syndrome." For some reason, we are fascinated by the destitute lives of the world's have-nots (Indians and Afghans are especially popular lately) and our privileged guilt prevents us from clearly or accurately judging fictional works that include any such misfortune. We are so blinded that we see only grime and grit, which we mistake for depth or significance or virtue, and we fail to notice the underlying bad story or ho-hum film. This book is not a good book, and I don't care if it's about Indian Siamese twins or set primarily in revolutionary Ethiopia. Those facts don't prevent me from calling rubbish "rubbish" when I've spent over 500 pages being suffocated by it, hoping for a redemptive ending that never comes.