Though punctuated with odd flashes of insight, his book on America is a slim sottisier in which facts have a nominal role. Reporting, it is not. There are signs that Baudrillard has decided to leaven the clogged mass of his jargon with bits of literary Americana; one detects, in the background, the hum of Henry Miller’s The Air-Conditioned Nightmare, Thomas Pynchon’s paranoid list-making and Norman Mailer’s sermons against plastic and cancer, as well as echoes from the more chiliastic passages of J. G. Ballard’s science fiction writing. The star of his own road movie, Baudrillard spends a great deal of time driving, for it is on the freeways—circulation again—that so much of the truth of America is to be found, or at any rate sought: “The speed of the screenplay, the indifferent reflex of television … the marvellously affectless succession of signs, images, faces, and ritual acts on the road.” Highway signs are, to him, epiphanies. “ ‘Right lane must exit.’ This ‘must exit’ has always struck me as a sign of destiny. I have got to go, to expel myself from this paradise, leave this providential highway which leads nowhere, but keeps me in touch with everyone. This is the only real society or warmth here …,” and so on, and so forth. No wonder he seldom gets out of the car.