[...] Ellis's characters do not even exist as archetypes -- we are sometimes given the sense that they do have individual qualities but that these are so spurious, negligible and second-hand as to be not worth mentioning. This is in itself ironic as contemporary America promises personality and personal liberation to individuals as part of the cornucopia of consumer choice. They are encouraged to spend their lives lovingly dissecting and nurturing their precious pysches in a ferment of personal growth, therapy, self-help, counselling, hypnotism, channelling, re-birth and a million other expensive forms of charlatanism, until they emerge, shrink-wrapped, into exactly the sort of worthless, uniform mediocrity that Ellis is citing. All in all, Ellis's disinclination to invest character with meaning is a reflection of a society overloaded with the endlessly circulating signs and signifiers of consumerism which are themselves devoid of meaning and doomed to revolve forever without substance or hope of signification in an "orgy of indifference, disconnection, exhibition and circulation." [...]