LRB · Pankaj Mishra · Modernity’s Undoing (print version)

LRB · Pankaj Mishra · Modernity’s Undoing (print version)

LRB · Pankaj Mishra · Modernity’s Undoing (print version)

A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan

It already seems as if it was a long time ago that America, transitioning from industrial to consumer capitalism, lurched into the age of postmodernity. The brisk destruction of old ways and the foreclosing of possibilities have become such an accepted fact – not least in the social sciences, from Daniel Bell to Fredric Jameson – that it is easy to forget what a large-scale re-engineering of human lives they have led to. Jennifer Egan, an American writer, is rare for still being able to register incredulity at the weirdness of this process. In her novel Look at Me (2001), she makes one of her main characters, an isolated intellectual, spell it all out: The ‘narrative of industrial America began with the rationalisation of objects through standardisation, abstraction and mass production’, and has concluded ‘with the rationalisation of human beings through marketing, public relations, image consulting and spin’.