The best thing about these stories might be that they're so palpably happening now: They get the slang, the profanity, the brands, the computers and the TV just right. (The delightful Briticism "mong," as in "to mong out in front of the TV," occurs more than once.) Much of the action of Tony White's "Poet" occurs within the confines of an Excel document, and Matthew Branton's "Monkey See" gets some zing from its intimate familiarity with the mechanics of downloading digital porn. Scarlett Thomas' "Mind Control" may contain the first literary use of the word "Dreamcast" in history. If your Dreamcast is as important to you as mine is to me, that's a landmark right there.

At their worst, they devolve into cheap, hard-boiled Hemingwayisms -- the absence of rhetoric itself becomes the hokiest kind of rhetorical ploy. Candida Clark's entry, for example, is an account of a chance encounter in a pub between the narrator and an acquaintance, right before the latter kills himself. "Fuck it all," growls the narrator, in closing. "He was right about that much. Always the same old shit."

Garland's effort, easily the most forgettable of the bunch, concerns a photographer at the Monaco speedway who watches a girl bare her tits and masturbate in public; the plot, such as it is, hangs on whether she'll come at just the right moment for him to snap her with a car in the background. "In France they call it petit mort," he muses. "Little death -- everyone knows that. Eskimos have an infinite number of words for snow ..." It's enough to make you beg for some elaborate punctuation.

A mixed bag, all in all, but that's not to say that it wasn't worth bagging. If there's anything more one really wants from the New Puritans, it's that they'd be a little more puritanical about it all -- that they'd have the courage of their convictions, which they clearly don't. They're just in it for a lark. Blincoe and Thorne themselves describe the manifesto as "partly playful." Most of the contributors didn't even actually sign the thing, and have no intention of abiding by its rules after the party's over. Like all manifestoes, this one is, au fond, a marketing gimmick, and an effective one -- no fewer than seven publishers were willing to take on the project.

Not that there's anything wrong with that. God knows, anybody who can sell literary fiction to a wider audience deserves a fucking medal. Where would we be if Pound hadn't been willing to pimp Eliot and Joyce to wealthy patrons? Even the saintly Bloomsburys knew how to milk their brand of intellectual chic for all it was worth. Still, they could at least have done a better job of pretending to believe in it. A little more fire and brimstone, people! Rail against those dinosaurs! "We want to sing the love of danger, the habit of energy and rashness," wrote the Futurists. Fascists they may have been, but that's a spicy meatball! One wants a manifesto nailed to the door of Norman Mailer's summer house with a big hot pointy stick, suitable for jabbing into big daddy Polyphemus' nearsighted eye, not one printed on thermal paper still warm from having scrolled out of the fax machine onto the floor of some literary agent's solarium. It'll take more than that to do away with the dinosaurs. When it's my turn on the Wayback Machine, I'll still be setting the controls for the Riviera.

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