[...] Many of the books currently being manufactured as part of a "Generation X" "movement" have at their dead cold centers the vacillating heart of the advertising executive. Kept aloft--that is, "relevant"--by a constant barrage of moronic platitudes concerning the meaninglessness of life (as if this were a new discovery), the emptiness of the sexual relationship (the latter-day democratization of whose romantic aspects is a dwindling luxury afforded by high capitalism's temporary redistribution of wealth), the absence of God [...] the narrator immediately reveals that what the second-person protagonist--implicitly the reader--really desires is re-entry into the world of middlebrow pleasures: a Ralph Lauren Sunday brunch of croissants, the Times, and a nice clean girl. [...]