from the conclusion of an excellent and entertaining essay entitled "E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction" by David Foster Wallace:

"Leyner's work, the best Image-Fiction yet, is both amazing and forgettable, wonderful and oddly hollow... It seems also to cast the predicament of Image-Fiction itself into stark relief: the best stuff the subgenre's produced to date is hilarious, upsetting, sophisticated, and extremely shallow--doomed to shallowness by its desire to ridicule a TV-culture whose mockery of itself and all value already absorbs all ridicule. Leyner's attempt to 'respond' to television via ironic genuflection is all too easily subsumed into the tired televisual ritual of mock-worship. It is dead on the page.
It's entirely possible that my plangent noises about the impossibility of rebelling against an aura that promotes and vitiates all rebellion may say more about my residency inside that aura, my own lack of vision, than they do about any exhaustion of U.S. fiction's possibilities. The next real literary 'rebels' in this country might well emerge as some weird bunch of anti-rebels, born oglers who dare somehow to back away from ironic watching, who have the childish gall actually to endorse and instantiate single-entendre principles. Who treat of plain old untrendy human troubles and emotions in U.S. life with reverence and conviction. Who eschew self-consciousness and hip-fatigue. These anti-rebels would be outdated, of course, before they even started. Dead on the page. Too sincere. Clearly repressed. Backward, quaint, naive, anachronistic. Maybe that'll be the point. Maybe that's why they'll be the next real rebels. Real rebels, as far as I can see, risk disapproval. The old postmodern insurgents risked the gasp and squeal: shock, disgust, outrage, censorship, accusations of socialism, anarchism, nihilism. Today's risks are different. The new rebels might be artists willing to risk the yawn, the rolled eyes, the cool smile, the nudged ribs, the parody of gifted ironists, the 'Oh how banal.' To risk accusations of sentimentality, melodrama. Of overcredulity. Of softness. Of willingness to be suckered by a world of lurkers and starers who fear gaze and ridicule above imprisonment without law."