[...] 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.