[...] Towards the end of the book, when Patrick's narrative increasingly tends to shiver and shake around the edges, the litany of designer names begins to falter: shoes by "Susan Warren Bennis Edwards" becomes shoes by "Warren Susan Allen Edmonds" and then shoes by "Edward Susan Bennis Allen". For such a tiny detail this is conspicuous in its effects. What ego-madness possesses a designer (and she's certainly not the only one) that she will inflict an insanely complex name on an entire retinue of stockists, advertisers, fashion-journalists and consumers? Why do we meekly accept and repeatedly intone such a vast array of fancy, complex, weirdly spelt (Manolo Blahnik) and obviously self-assumed names? What drives Patrick crazy is driving us all crazy -- why don't we all just crack up and start screaming about brand-names and up-town pizza recipes, like he does? Thus, detail by detail, as if bricking up a tomb, Ellis defines Patrick's insanity and our own place within it.

[...] any encounter with Luis tends towards the farcical. When he returns from his business trip to Phoenix he describes the dinner he had with his client, a routine-sounding affair of roasted chicken and cheesecake. Patrick gets anxious, confused "by this alien, plain-sounding list". He asks feverishly, "What sauce or fruits were on the roasted chicken? What shapes was it cut into?" Luis is confused. "It was ... roasted,"he says. Patrick demands to know what the client's bimbo had. Scallops, apparently. "The scallops were grilled? Were they sashimi scallops? In a ceviche of sorts? ... Or were they gratinized?" "No, Patrick," Luis says. "They were ... broiled." Patrick then thinks for a while. "What's broiled, Luis?" "I'm not sure," he says. "I think it involves ... a pan." There lies the gulf between the yuppies and the rest of the known world.

American Dad, published originally in 1981, was [...] chiefly remarkable for Janowitz's choice of a male narrator and protagonist. It is relatively rare for a woman writer to adopt the male voice [...] women become, in theoretical terms, bisexual and it is rare for them to go further and claim the male voice in its entirey [...] Janowitz does not use the male persona here to deliver any sarcastic feminist critique of men. Her portrayal [....] is a gentle and sympathetic on as if she had merely transposed many of her own adolescent memories -- as one does in a first novel -- into a male body without any particular reflection on the obsession with gender difference that had seized the rest of the Western world [...] it frees Janowitz from any of the constraints of representing a world newly imbued with feminism which would have been unavoidable with a female narrator. At the same time it allows her to usurp a very male tradition of American fiction [...]

Now, after everything possible has been done to the form of the novel the whole future of fiction seems to hang in the balance. Will anyone, apart from scholars, read at all in the future? Surveys suggest that relatively few people read books even now and that of those, the majority tend towards genre -- romance, crime, horror - much of which echoes the conventions of traditional narrative in terms of plot, structure and character. "Serious" fiction seems to belong increasingly to academia and the academics, to the creative writing class and the beleagured intellectual rather than to the public at large. It has become too frail and etiolated a plant to survive out there in the world among the crashing music, the clamour and the cartoons of contemporary life. Novelists wish to be read but realism in fiction is no longer a device that can animate characters who inhabit this modern world; their desires, their love affairs, their very selves are now so muddled by commodity fetishism, consumer homogeneity and a chaos of contemporary cultural imperatives that it is now almost impossible for authors to animate and illuminate character in the ways that they were once able to do.

[...] Ellis's apparent vapidity and abnegation of moral issues tends to conceal a harsh, stony-faced puritanism whereas Wojnarowicz's moral stance emerges from a much gentler and more optimistic view, which nevertheless speaks of a wearing away of the spirit in close, daily observation of the unbearable. Wojnarowicz lacks something of the sense of cleansing fire occasionally perceptible in Ellis's work but that sort of scourging is a luxury that Wojnarowicz has never been able to afford. His own moral rage is a less complex, more pared-to-the-bone and ultimately much more humane manifestation of values forged in daily adversity. [...]

[...] somewhere within that brush of angel's wings there is, even more faintly, the tiny shadow of an idea, inarticulated, that maybe not absolutely all of the serious ugliness and sickness lay in the opponents, the straight, corrupt world, but that some of it, at a much deeper level than the one that is always easy and cool to acknowledge, actually lies in us ourselves, the traditional victims, the outsiders, the persecuted.

[...] To old, dirty Europe, America has always seemed aglow with toothpaste, Gleem and deodorizers for every intimate inch. Showers seem to gush constantly. And Hollywood -- every image has been dry-cleaned. We know that America is pathologically, obsessively, fanatically obsessed with hygiene. This fear of contamination seems to be part of the psychic pulse of the nation. [...]

On a more mundane level, consumer capitalism badly needs the artistic imagination: someone has to create Mickey Mouse or Treasure Island, Fagin or Hannibal Lecter and all the other fictions represented in simulation. So it seems that art will continue, whether the artist is subsumed by the spectacle like Norman Mailer, or tries to resist it, as did Thomas Pynchon. All the writers covered in this book have had the immense task of trying to reanimate fiction in the wake of high postmodern experimentation. They have had to deal with a fragmented, absurd society, driven by commodity relations and loosely united at various points by sites of resistance such as feminist or gay politics. Faced with this sort of complexity it is an act of courage to write novels at all. The best writers are usually the most subversive: those most critical of the society in which they find themselves. Those writers who are prepared to learn from and evoke past novelists also seem to have extra strength: books provide refuge and comfort as well as inspiration in a wholly bewildering world.