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we've read this book before, this book is straight off the production line — we've read Luster or I'm a Fan or Mona or maybe the grandmother of them all, written almost a hundred years ago now, My Year of Rest and Relaxation; and that's just what I could think up without leaving the sofa or referring to any notes. we've met the first-person narrator of this book before — chatty, glamorous, glamorous, we are assured, we are given plenty of evidence as to her beauty and her brandedness both, making references (in this case to Bakhtin) that reassure us that we are not reading Junk but Literature; but at the same time in possession of a remarkably invariant set of character flaws, judgmental, vacuous, pour épater les bourgeois being racist or making fun of a fat person or performing some other act that signals to us that we are enlightened readers, we are not blindly capitulating to the moral police, we are in the real world now, we are among the select who understand that narrators can be unlikeable, our philosophy of fiction is just saying ‘characters don't have to be relatable� to each other in tones of soft delight; but then isn't it curious how all unlikeable narrators are hot and racist? is an ugly non-racist axiomatically likeable and therefore off the table? and why are all these women the same? does the caloric restriction make them stupid?

� and in any case, we have also seen this narrative before � aforementioned edgily unlikeable woman undergoes prolonged psychological dissolution � during which she briefly deviates from her essentially behaviourally heterosexual lifestyle by sleeping with a woman, which of course as we all know is the same thing as sleeping with yourself, a claim that many of these novels make more subtly than this one � and all this due, in an extremely obvious and surface-level way, to unaddressed trauma caused by something morally beyond reproach (in this case, dead parents, being Palestinian) that in its simplicity and nature gives the lie to previous professions of edginess. simple, unchallenging sentences which fit well on a smartphone screen are also essential. (in fact this book is the board book version, the See Spot Run version, of The Passion according to G.H.. say what you will about Clarice — and I do — but at least back in her day sentences were real sentences!)

enough! enough! we have read them all! it is OK if you stop writing them now!