Instruct: Classify an Amazon review as either positive or negative.
Query: Neither black nor white nor much fun

This sure sounded good. Joe Klein made an excellent novel out of similar material. Tarloff begins with an interesting premise and keeps his characters in the intriguing gray area of believable human behavior, their hats neither clearly white nor black.So why is the novel not much fun, and eventually interminable, despite its brief length? Perhaps because it doesn't read like a novel, but rather like a prose outline for one: we are told everything, shown little. In theory, the story presented is interesting, but theory is all we get, and eventually it all gets kind of whiny and annoying. And although the book remains well-balanced, it almost never, ever funny.Without humor, or anything resembling a satiric edge, we're left with an earnest sexual/political soap opera in which not much happens. This book feels as if it contains a good story struggling to break free, but it never quite manages to do so.