A polymath who writes with enviable fluency about music, literature, politics and the place where the mainstream meets the counterculture, Marcus applies a Fitzgeraldian lens to a host of disparate artistic developments, interweaving them in enlightening, idiosyncratic fashion.

Mr. Marcus is good on the effects that the book would come to have on our culture, from the soundtrack-like embedding of popular music in works of fiction to the Gatsby-esque elements of detective novels and movies.

Unlike those who write dry, hyper-specialized academic criticism, Marcus isn’t afraid, as one reader of his once put it, to let 'everything remind him of everything else'.

Unfortunately, Under the Red White and Blue is marred by self-indulgence. Marcus follows his pet interests. The result is a torrent of self-absorbed, insufficiently contextualised discursions (on Moby Dick, bluesmen, hard-boiled crime fiction, police procedurals) and free-association riffs retailed in hectic sub-Pauline Kael prose. Its accounts of movie and stage adaptations are mostly description, yielding scant critical insight. The overall effect is of a logorrhoea of pop culture arcana: the critic as garrulous Danny Baker blabbermouth.

[Marcus], a master of juxtaposition, draws provocative, unexpected connections among literature, music, and movies.

... an idiosyncratic book that occasionally soars.