he is sure that he is not attractive enough for his surroundings, and thus 'sets' his face into an interesting rictus

Again, this is funny and wily, but beneath it runs dread, the dread of nullity. For the book's persistent question is: If Adam Gordon were able to summon himself into authenticity, would there be anything to see? Are we in fact constituted by our inauthenticities? When Adam appears on a panel to discuss literature and politics, he has nothing to say, and trots out platitudes that he learns by heart, along with a quotation from Ortega y Gasset ('who I had at one time thought was two people, like Deleuze and Guattari, Calvin and Hobbes'). [...]

a fairly familiar postmodern defence of poetry: We are all trapped in modes of inauthenticity, all of us mediated by discourses more powerful than the mere individual's