[...] Although Andy Warhol was personally more or less unequivocally loving about consumer culture his art-works were understood by the critical establishment to be seriously ironic and indeed they had that cutting edge to them. Some of the writing we are considering is closer in attitude to he work of Jeff Koons, whose detailed large-scale simulations of kitsch objects and totemic entertainment figures are both iconic and laudatory. Koons entirely lacks the "distancing" effect of Warhol's work, that cool space where a range of quasi-ironic reaction is expected. He has frequently been accused of having himself been blandly "consumed" by the consumer artefacts he portrays. It really is a question of distance. When one exists completely within a culture, as do the younger writers we are studying who have no memory of the certainties nad judgements of hte pre-sixties world, even though that culture may be a self-conscious and "ironic" one itself in many ways (look at advertising), it is impossible to sustain ironic comment about that culture as if one were writing from without it. [...]

[...] 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." [...]

[...] Ellis's fictional characters [...] have not experienced the vast cultural and politico-economic upheavals of the late 1960s and early seventies. The postmodern is the only world they know. They have inherited its treacherous freedoms without dialectics.

[...] Blair and Clay are young, rich, attractive and "in love" yet the conventional accoutrements of a happy romance -- sun, sea, sex -- bore them quickly. It is all used up within a few days and the bone-deep restlessness causes them to turn away from each other, to re-focus on the ever-present television which will be selling them dreams of exactly the kind they are engaged in. They consume their own happiness, bolting it down as though something in their awareness of themselves as this lucky, privileged couple were sickening them even as they glut. It is as though the advertisement-like, hyperreal qualities of their situation render it tenuous and unreal. What is there to say? What is there to do? What is there to be interested in? Nothing. [...]

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 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.' [...]

[...] It was hardly surprising that a novel which unequivocally condemned a way of life to which many people had sacrificed their youth and energy was tepidly received; journalists were as much at the mercy of the status-driven conspicuous consumption of the eighties as anyone else and the forth over the book's alleged violence may have concealed a hideous disquiet that the leotards and Agnes B. leggings, the enormous mortgages and obscene restaurant bills were ... just ... not worth it.

[...] that still leaves the problem of trying to define when the author himself has decided to distance himself from events. He might, for example, mistrust women but presumably he wasn't in favour of popping out people's eyeballs? This put the critic in the ludicrous position of, firstly, supplying the moral framework to the book and arguing, in effect, for dualism and old-fashioned fictive ambiguity and secondly, of having to tangle with the autobiographical element in fiction -- of defining the author's own feelings, intentions and standards. This has the effect of turning the tables on the reader; rather than being presented with a well-ordered fictive universe, secure in its moral delineation, the reader is, forced to engage personally with the text, to fill in the blanks, as it were, if he is not to produce a completely coarse and slip-shod reading. The reader is forced to scrutinize his own values and beliefs, rather than those being provided for him within a Good-Evil fictive universe. The alternative is to reject these misleading binary oppositions that Jacques Derrida has defined as intrinsic to Western thinking and to immerse oneself in the free play of signifiers within the text. Ellis himself does not achieve judgment and closure in the text but an endless circularity and deferral of meaning.