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[...] Ellis's apparent vapidity and abnegation of moral issues tends to conceal a harsh, stony-faced puritanism whereas Wojnarowicz's moral stance emerges from a much gentler and more optimistic view, which nevertheless speaks of a wearing away of the spirit in close, daily observation of the unbearable. Wojnarowicz lacks something of the sense of cleansing fire occasionally perceptible in Ellis's work but that sort of scourging is a luxury that Wojnarowicz has never been able to afford. His own moral rage is a less complex, more pared-to-the-bone and ultimately much more humane manifestation of values forged in daily adversity. [...]
[...] somewhere within that brush of angel's wings there is, even more faintly, the tiny shadow of an idea, inarticulated, that maybe not absolutely all of the serious ugliness and sickness lay in the opponents, the straight, corrupt world, but that some of it, at a much deeper level than the one that is always easy and cool to acknowledge, actually lies in us ourselves, the traditional victims, the outsiders, the persecuted.
[...] 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.