The Culture of Narcissism

George Tro was born in 1943. And I see the essay as an attempt to create a framework and vocabulary for understanding the changes that America was undergoing during his lifetime. The book is of a piece with Christopher Lashes, late 70s book, The Culture of Narcissism, and Don de Lillos book from five years later, White Noise. He works through these, his ideas in a poetic and aphoristic style that creates a vocabulary that becomes native to the essay itself. If you were coming to it cold, even though it appeared, taking up, I think, an entire issue of almost of the New Yorker or most of an issue of theNew Yorker, it would be