Instruct: Classify a given review as either positive or negative.
Query: trivial pursuit

You have to like the style of this book to like the book. People say they like what Eggars does with his mothers death--I read it, completely unmoved and realized later I was supposed to be touched and shocked by the generation x-syle brutally honest delivery. Nope. I don't mean to be overly critical but there is nothing particularly artful about this work. If you like the whole "look how quirky and dysfunctional I am, isn't it cool?" genre, then you'll like this book. Perhaps this says more about me than the author, but I didn't get it that the book was supposed to be shocking or amusing. He seemed to be just telling a story in a very non-literary way of things that happened in his life. I kept waiting for a plot.... The influence on what we call "generation x" of MTV and 30 minute television news magazines is evident here. Something stands in for artful storytelling, but I don't know what it is.