My interpetation reading it is the mathematician's answer for both "yes".
To elaborate the article, book, and promptional articles for books are fundamentally part dealing with the same thing which ha raised alarm bells.
The sort of formulaic overexposed attempt at monetizing some sort of Zeitgeist while making sensationalist claims. It even checks boxes of the "literary fiction which slavishly keeps to conventions of setting, copious use of symbolism, and serious topics, and thinks itself better than genre fiction not realizing it is just another genre itself" pretension.
It may theortically actually be good and groundbreaking but it feels like a paint by numbers "guru", ignoring unsolicited emails and banner ads claiming you won something is the default behavior for good reason. The heuristics default to "ignore".
Not the OP, but I think it's fairly obvious they're dismissing the book based on the description of the book from the article that the OP just quoted.
To be fair: The Guardian really needs to include less of Anna Furman's (the article writers) sensationalist summaries and more of Anna Weiner's (the actual book author) work.
To elaborate the article, book, and promptional articles for books are fundamentally part dealing with the same thing which ha raised alarm bells.
The sort of formulaic overexposed attempt at monetizing some sort of Zeitgeist while making sensationalist claims. It even checks boxes of the "literary fiction which slavishly keeps to conventions of setting, copious use of symbolism, and serious topics, and thinks itself better than genre fiction not realizing it is just another genre itself" pretension.
It may theortically actually be good and groundbreaking but it feels like a paint by numbers "guru", ignoring unsolicited emails and banner ads claiming you won something is the default behavior for good reason. The heuristics default to "ignore".