What McInerney continually teases out of his novel is the sense that American fiction simply cannot keep up with the reality that surrounds it, and that writing must therefore serve the function of self-preservation rather than description or mere escapism. In effect McInerney builds into his novel the misgivings that other writers have expressed about the novel. [...]

Then she said, 'Do young men need sex? ...

'... Come on. What's to hide? I wish I'd known a long time ago that I was going to die. We could've gotten to know each other a lot better. There's so much we don't know' ...

You began to forget the way she looked then, and to see her somehow as young, younger than you had ever known her. The wasted flesh seemed illusory. You saw her as a young woman.'

The teenage dread is not so much dramatized (as with Caulfield or Sport) but is, to borrow Jacques Derrida's phrase, sous rature -- as though the very presence of the idea owrks only to emphasize the extent to which it should be absent.

The critic Edward Said has pointed out the ironies of placing Eastern and Western voices in such rigid opposition, and has unravelled them in such a way as to show that this strategy is a kind of philosophical imperialism -- an imposition of Western images about the East onto the East. America constructs the mysticism that it desires, creates the differences it then wishes it could transcend. Japanese otherness -- all full of Eastern promise -- thus becomes an identity to be consumed, acquired, an essential accessory for any self-respecting Dharma Bum. [...]

[...] the bespectacled transvestitite in Singapore who, when asked to name the best restaurant in a town justly celebrated for its unique combination of Chinese, Indian and Malaysian delicacies, answers, without a moment's hesitation, 'Denny's.' [...]