Downtown Owl, Klosterman. Yes. In discussing this book with my librarian, I learned that a more recent reading of 1984, and paying more attention, would have let me notice some things that Klosterman was doing. Noticing them might even not have annoyed me.
Klosterman’s writing was by and large clean enough that a couple things really slapped me in the face. The first of these was when he described T-shirts as promoting their insignias (this incident looks an awful lot like the writer going back and changing a word without re-reading the whole sentence afterward to confirm that’s what he meant). We’ve all seen shirts bearing insignias, possibly even sporting them, but promoting an insignia? Promoting the entity represented by the insignia, sure. Not to say that the notion that the shirt is promoting the signifier rather than the signified isn’t interesting; but if that’s your thesis, I need you to spend more than one word on it, because I don’t want to be sent down this semiotic rathole unless I can tell that’s where the writer wanted me to go. And probably not even then.
There were also a couple instances of adding incorrect detail: he talks about the numbers on a rotary phone’s dial being dragged counter-clockwise, and they’re just not (even leaving aside the fact that you don’t drag the numbers at all: the hole next to the number is dragged, and it’s dragged clockwise). The other unnecessary detail that pulled me right out of the story was a mention of the Tonight show ending at 11:35. The story takes place in the Mountain time zone, so the hour is right, but while Carson may have run slightly past the half-hour, Letterman started no later than 32:30 after the hour during the era in which the book was set.
It’s not so hard, folks: if you’re going to get so detailed that the reader is likely (or even able) to summon a picture of an item and compare it to your description, please get the details correct. Or bury them, as Douglas Coupland did in JPod. I didn’t even try to find the incorrect digit of pi, nor did I give more than a cursory examination to see if I could spot the O in the sea of 0s (though I was a little surprised it didn’t jump out at me). And yet, even with the burying, I have full confidence Coupland got the details right.