The most immediately attractive of Ashon’s cast is Peter Jones, “the premier lifestyle journalist of his generation”, who has generated from writing style pieces about badly dressed friends to pieces about books, films, music, garden furniture and food and finally “the semiotics of whatever everyday object caught his attention”. Now he’s trapped as “the Kafka of the Designer Pepperpot”, imprisoned in a constantly simmering marriage, unable to cope with his swearing son, Gus, and fearing that he cannot summon up emotion about anything beyond the trivial. Jones is particularly interested in “blankness”, which may be a comment on the “blank generation” fiction of Ellis and McInerney, but seems more a way of separating Jones from the more emotionally intemperate characters that surround him.
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