SOURCE: "Raging Midlife Crisis as Contemporary Ethos," in The New York Times, May 2, 1995, p. C17.

In the following review, Kakutani favorably discusses The Information as "ambitious" and "uncompromising," and predicts that the book will be favorably received.

Once in a while in some artists' careers, there comes along a work that sums up all their preoccupations, all their technical innovations to date. Sometimes, as in the case of Philip Roth's novel Operation Shylock, the work is simply a playful but solipsistic dictionary of familiar riffs and routines, a self-referential game of mirrors. Other times, as in the case of Ingmar Bergman's film Fanny and Alexander, the work is a wonderful synthesis of all that has gone before, a synthesis that not only serves as a kind of Rosetta stone to an oeuvre, but also transcends the sum of its parts.

While Martin Amis's new novel, The Information, is...