X. Lit: Jennifer Government….

There’s a good chance I won’t finish Max Barry’s novel, Jennifer Governement. The ending seems pretty predictable, not to knock Mr. Barry, after all his published and fairly well read as far as I can tell and I’m just some schmuck blathering away on the interner to little, if any, avail, nevermind actual readership. My reason for this: I’m rereading Cormac McCarthy’s novel, The Road, for….wait for it….a book club. Yeah, that’s right. As non-GenXer as it may be to “join” anything, especially groups, I’ve decided to give it a try. Of course, there are not many books that I would join a book club for but The Road is definitely one of them. We’ll see how it goes. Also, I’ve written previously here that I consider McCarthy to be an X. Lit author. This might well give me opportunity to explain myself in greater detail. But I would like to make one point about Jennifer Government, concerning one of the primary charcters — John Nike. And that is that he, I would assert, is a distant, though softer and more comical, cousin of Patrick Bateman, the main character and narrator of Brett Easton Ellis’ continuingly (is that a word?) controversial novel, American Psycho. Both are slick yuppies with little regard for human life. They share similar concerns with material goods and surface details. And they especially seem to embody that Ellis theme of foregoing deep, meaningful human emotions and feelings for intensity of sensations via sex, drugs and alchohol, and especially violence. Of course, Batement is the epitomy of this particular ethos, grimly and repulsively so, while John Nike is more of comic book version of it, which is probably why no one will scream for Max Barry’s head to be lopped off and posted on spit.

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