Normie Transgression

Rob Doyle’s Cameo has a distinctly “postmodern” resonance that seems almost archaic in the present moment. Three decades removed from its heyday in the Gen-X literature of the 1990s, Doyle writes in the stylistic lineage of writers like Bret Easton Ellis. The aesthetic legacy of this “postmodernism” was a recuperation of certain elements rooted in the literary “avant-garde” extended to the level of pastiche, and alluding to ideas more elevated and profound than what was actually communicated at the level of text. Ellis was virtuoso in this regard, a novelist of pure instinct and “vibe,” possessing an almost unmatched ability to imply some underlying profundity, intelligence, and depth that was more often than not absent. Most of his oeuvre, superficially brutal and unpleasant, also seems in retrospect to be curiously sanitized despite the depravity of its subject. It was a literary equivalent to concomitant processes within cinema and television that has resulted in the normalization of gratuitous violence and explicit sex even within the most staid, pedestrian, and uninteresting cultural outputs. Indeed this was avant-garde ‘transgression’ for the ordinary punter, the middle-brow aesthete, the general reader: the normie.