 There's a particular ethos in US culture, especially in entertainment and marketing culture, that very much appeals to people as individuals, that you don't have to be devoted or subservient to anything else. There is no larger good than your own good and your own happiness. And that in the book, as best I can recall, characters who become drug addicts, there is a form that the root in English of addict is the Latinata cherry, which means religious devotion. It was an attribute of beginning monks, I think. There's an element in the book in which various people are living out something that I think is true, which is that we all worship and we all have a religious impulse. We can choose to an extent what we worship, but the myth that we worship nothing and give ourselves away to nothing simply sets us up to give ourselves away to something different, for instance, pleasure or drugs or the idea of having a lot of money and being able to buy nice stuff. Or in the tennis academy, it's somewhat different. It's devotion to an athletic pursuit that requires a certain amount of sacrifice and discipline but is nevertheless an individual sport and one is trying to get ahead as an individual. I doubt this makes very much sense, but whatever the conditions of hopelessness you're talking about, at least in infinite jest, have to do, I think, with an American idea and not a universal one, but one that I think kids get exposed to very early, that you are the most important and what you want is the most important and that your job in life is to gratify your own desires. That's a little crude to say it that way, but in fact it's something of the ideology here and it's certainly the ideology that's perpetrated by television and advertising and entertainment and the economy thrives on it.