First-time author Toby Litt is in danger of falling victim to the kind of empty consumerism he sends up in Adventures in Capitalism - superficial, ephemeral, instantly digested and easily forgotten.
The marketing gibberish of the book's promotion strategy gives the game away, 'massive 'product-based' campaign', 'exclusive further adventures on simultaneous Internet release'; 'campaign to extend into areas of popular culture such as music and fashion to reflect the top-brow/pop-brow themes expounded in the stories'.
It is all deliciously ironic given that this book, a collection of 18 short sketches and fragments (one would hesitate to call them full-blown 'short stories'), mercilessly lampoons Britain's throwaway culture - the marketing types, the Internet geeks, the clubbing poseurs, the empty-headed yuppies.
The book goes off like a grenade, with the main blast of the more meaty segments inflicting grievous damage on its targets.
The book needs to carry some kind of caution on the front: 'Warning - completely meaningless to anyone other than Britons.' Who else will understand the mock profile of Mr Kipling (maker of 'exceedingly good cakes', according to the television adverts) or the title of the opening chapter 'It Could Have Been Me And It Was', derived from the slogan of the National Lottery, which has become a British obsession? Sometimes Litt is so obscure hardly anyone will get the point.
In the section called 'Moriarty', all atmosphere and no substance, he pointlessly reconstructs characters from Sherlock Holmes as children from public housing estates.
Or in 'HMV', which is written throughout in a (presumably deliberate) gobbledygook.