HELLO, I’M SPECIAL, by Hal Niedzviecki
(City Lights, $15,95; release date April 2006)

Posted by Anneli Rufus at 2:37 pm, Thursday, May 11, 2006

The cooler you think you are, the more of a pathetic loser-drone you probably actually are, in Canadian zinester Niedzviecki’s grim vision of an American culture so co-opted by celebrity-worship and corporations (and the latter calculatingly creates the former, his theory goes) that even thinking you’re thinking an original thought is just a sad delusion cooked up by the masterminds who brought you Big Macs and Eminem and even modern-day antiwar rallies, imprinted onto your brain somewhere between the fourth and fifth freeway onramp. It’s a jarring wake-up call, but in blasting sitting ducks while insufficiently dissecting the narcissism epidemic spawned by parents and teachers, it offers too few solutions.

Grade: C+



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