I first read this after seeing the movie when it came out (1997), and I remember thinking the story was so edgy and cool and retro and challenging (I was seventeen), and so in a way this reread almost thirty (ack) years later was as much about revisiting my former self-as-reader as it was about revisiting the story. It was good and the sentence-level writing is masterful—just really, really fresh and thoughtful and skilled—but I also recognized in the narrative (as opposed to the style—the way the narrative is told) the hallmarks of a Certain Type of Story written by a Certain Type of [Young Male] Writer in a Certain Era (look at who else was popular during this time), and a lot of it gave me the ick in places where I think I was intended to feel recognition and reassurance that I wasn’t alone in my simple white, middle-class, suburban perversions. Anyhoooooo, I enjoyed working my way through this as “problematic lit from the recent past,” and I always appreciate these opportunities to go back in time and observe my old self too. Cheers to our growth as individuals and as a community of consumers of art.