He wanted to extend the point he had made in “E Unibus Pluram” two years before. Then he had mostly diagnosed a disease; now he was giving a model for the cure. American writers were still content to describe an ironic culture when they should be showing the way out. They had still not discovered, as he wrote in Infinite Jest, that “what looks like the cage’s exit is actually the bars of the cage.” “Who is to blame,” he concluded in his VLS piece, “for the unseriousness of our serious fiction?
