Over the last ten years America has produced the most innovative, radical, fresh fiction in the world - fiction that is an accurate reflection of contemporary urban life and the sensibilities of a new generation. Books like Jay McInerney's Bright Lights, Big City and Bret Easton Ellis's Less Than Zero have caused controversy, been immense popular and commercial successes, and made their authors as famous as pop stars. But once these books became hits the media dismissed the writers and their work as mere products of hype. There has not, in America, been any serious critical discourse on what the work means.
Now two young British critics, Elizabeth Young and Graham Caveney, offer an incisive, provocative commentary on these writers, who, they argue, represent a significant shift in contemporary American literature. Starting with the work of McInerney, Ellis, and Tama Janowitz and continuing through that of Mary Gaitskill, Michael Chabon, Dennis Cooper, Lynne Tillman, David Wojnarowicz, and others, Young and Caveney utilize a combination of cultural analysis and literary criticism that reveals these books to be illuminating critiques, not merely products, of a society shaped by consumer capitalism and media saturation. This, they argue, is the fiction of firsthand experience - it arises from within postmodern culture and, in content as well as style, demonstrates an absolute mastery of the semiotic codes (pop music, television, advertising) that compose our society.
Shopping in Space is an important book of literary and cultural commentary. E. M. Forster once said that what literature can do that objective history cannot is render ''the buzz of implication'' of an era. This fiction - of urban depravity and moral decay, of sexual excess and simulation - certainly render the buzz of our times.