Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

I (along with most of the 1 star reviewers) do not understand what all the hype is about surrounding this horrilby written, fragmented, self-indulgent piece of garbage. Stephen King even calls this a masterpiece on the jacket blurb? WHAT? Did we read the same book? And most of the 5 star reviews sound like they were press releases written by her publisher (although, in fairness, most people talk in this disjointed, sound bite manner, so who can tell anymore what is hype and what is opinion). Anyway, this book is just self-indulgent clap-trap from an author who can at times write very lyrical prose, but a good editor should have pulled several hundred pages from the manuscript or not published the book. Tartt hasn't written a novel in 10 years. If she spent that time working on this novel, she wasted a decade. Most of the characters are unsympathetic, the narrator is completely unreliable (and not in a good way), the issues of time/technology (iPhones/iPads, etc. appear in timelines where they wouldn't have existed) and a terrorist bombing at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York that is used as a plot device to get things rolling (not believeable on its face if you've ever set foot in the museum) are beyond annoying! I went with the plot devices though because I really truly wanted to like this book, but when the narrator is talking about an apartment on 7th Avenue that he supposedly lived in and also describes an apartment on Beekman Place, I have to wonder if he even knows where the hell he lived. But again, he is unreliable as a drug-addled mess. Boris, one of the other characters, is a Polish/Russian/Ukrainian something (clearly eastern European, but that is about as well narrowed down as it gets) and when Tartt writes dialogue in his characters voice, I can hear a Russian accent. But when she is writing dialogue for another character, Hobie, who is from Albany, NY, there is a decidedly English ring to everything that he says, although he is clearly not English. All of the male characters are broken creatures who have mommy issues, all of the women are either dead or leave one wishing they were, and while sections of this book are page turning, there is no payoff at the end and her diatribe about art and philosophy that takes up the last 20 pages of this ridiculous rambling mess, leaves me wondering if she has a point of view on the subject, which would be extremely helpful as she is the bloody author! I will end here, as I fear I'm beginning to ramble as badly as the author does in this nearly 800 page disaster, but suffice it to say I cannot recommend this book.