[If] one of the major trajectories of the modernist response to an increasingly commodified social reality has been the subjective projection of privatized language across and throughout the landscape or situation which serves as the occasion for the piece, the complementary path of that response has been the portrayal of the human subject as an instance or utterance of the debased cultural code that babbles and rushes through our minds. Thus, the four major characters of Macho Camacho's Beat are all more or less immobilized conduits of verbal wastes…. [Throughout the novel,] the fabulous guaracha of Macho Camacho, "Life is a Phenomenal Thing" plays again and again and again, twitching their "thoughts" to its beat; and a disc jockey's insipid hyperboles separate one character's passages from the next's, in the turgid, demotic la ronde of language that constitutes the book…. (p. 135)

In his extraordinary ability to fuse diverse...