"The joy of postmodernist/hysterical realist lit is how playful and perverse it can be with English itself, yet many people, quite rightly, view it as alienatingly boring because many practitioners take that abundance of knowledge and capacity and narrow it to an absorbed self-serious narrative focus. The words might confuse, might be ambiguous and all over the place, but the eventual path they tread is straight, short and from one point to another barely distinguishable point, going torturously a few steps, like leaving A-prime to arrive at Secondar-A. The whole effect is a literary version of watching John McEnroe eschew serve-and-volley to gruntingly slam balls from the baseline, of hearing Eric Clapton crank power chords on fuzzed-out distortion—it’s watching every Iron Chef winner and judge spend 12 hours crafting a sugarless poptart."