• Like this year's hemline, we may all simply have to endure ‘postmodernism’ until the next season. So perhaps we should face facts and start taking a few notes, to be casually dropped at our next garden party. Language, they tell us, and particularly literary language, doesn't describe the world, but only the meaningless machinery of language itself. Character and story are cultural restraints to the ‘free play’ of self and identity, and as such should be subverted. Authors shouldn't write novels any more, but rather ‘deconstruct the Western metaphysic’… Like many post-moderns, Paul Auster has a theory about the world, but, unfortunately, nothing to go with it. In his new novel, In the Country of Last Things, the narrator who travels across Auster's fragmented, entropic landscape never discovers her lost brother, but only other lost people, vast quantities of dead and disused objects. It is a world in which language neither works nor matters; it simply lies brokenly about (Scott Bradfield, ‘Thoroughly Postmodern’, The Listener, 28 Jul 88).