The novel details a future in which "California is an occupied territory, the United Nations is for poor countries, and America’s president is named Friendly, but the media-obsessed, personal-computer-equipped denizens[...] are blissfully unconcerned about the brink of armageddon.
Club, Ellen Wernecke awarded the novel a "B," noting, "Pop Apocalypse buzzes with biblical references (the giant neon halo over the Omni Science headquarters is the most obvious) and constant reminders of the end times, but that isn’t necessarily bad: The occasionally overwrought imagery is useful for organizing the technology and history of this Department Of Homeland Security-meets-YouTube world[....]The process of building that world is initially a distraction from Eliot’s cringe-inducing metamorphosis from rich party kid to concerned citizen, but the details of his known universe are just close enough to terror fantasies and current corporate skullduggery as to be riveting.
"[3] Publishers Weekly presented another positive look at the novel, writing, "This playful and witty novel takes our celebrity-obsessed and media-hijacked culture, mixes in geopolitics and a dash of cyberpunk dystopia to create an intelligent and blistering what-if.
"[10] He also notes, "[m]ore importantly, [Adam] Kelly's focus on the 'ethical' accounts for only a narrow sector of contemporary efforts to move beyond the postmodern," as movements beyond postmodernism should not only address "questions of traditional ethical or moral concern but also a broader universe of mental training, including political life, of which the ethical aspiration to sincerity is indeed one important dimension"[11] Konstantinou examines figures of American life, the hipster and the punk, and their relation to irony.
He contends that "by studying the hipster, the Ur-ironist of postwar life - a character type many artists and intellectuals thought was best adapted to the age of abundance - we can reconstruct the foundations of our contemporary picture of irony and, in doing so, revise many deeply ingrained assumptions about its subversive power"[12] He then traces the concept of "hipness" through American history, beginning in 1938 with Cab Calloway and jive and moving through authors such as Ralph Ellison and Thomas Pynchon.
Konstantinou concludes the chapter by contending that "the quest for hip became a branch of a more general postwar quest for criticality as such, which was neither at odds with the liberal 'status quo' nor just another form of positivism[...]Hipness became a characterological weapon in an intellectual conflict that pitted increasingly stale critical institutions against newer forms of knowingness, newer places outside of society that were, simultaneously, inside emerging subcultural groups or coteries that claimed to occupy advantageous epistemic vantage points on American life.
He discusses the use of this figure in fiction, such as in Jennifer Egan's A Visit from the Goon Squad, where Egan envisions "a near future in which the advanced understanding and manipulation of the cool leads to the rise of a postironic youth culture" [20] He contends that "[a]fter all, Egan seems to show, new forms of authentic experience can still emerge unexpectedly even in a world whose social life is fully enclosed within corporate platforms"[21] Konstantinou concludes the chapter by asserting that "[t]he lesson the coolhunter teachers is that such sensitivity requires, at a minimum, both a critically distant and aesthetically invested sense of the market and the world"[22] In his conclusion, Konstantinou discusses the Occupy movement.
Instead, he offers, "[w]e must, therefore, cultivate within ourselves an ironic understanding of our own countercultural inheritance while simultaneously developing a nonironic commitment to learning how to build enduring institutions that have the capacity not only to rouse spirits but also to dismantle the power of those whose strength partly depends on our cynicism"[25] In a review of Cool Characters for Times Higher Education, Robert Eaglestone praises the book.
He argues, "All of these analyses are complex and detailed, led by a deep engagement with literary texts, their cultural surroundings, and are astutely theoretically informed.
"<[26] In a recent publication from The Chronicle of Higher Education, Konstantinou responds to Rita Felski’s remarks on the dependency of literary scholars on critique: “There’s actually quite a diverse range of intellectual frameworks, politically, theoretically, philosophically, yet there’s an underlying similarity in terms of this mood of vigilance, wariness, suspicion, distrust, which doesn’t really allow us to grapple with these really basic questions about why people actually take up books in the first place, why they matter to people.”[27] Felski emphasizes the need to move past critique and the Danish National Research Foundation has awarded her $4.2 million to a study led by Felski “to investigate the social uses of literature.”[27] However, Konstantinou has rebuked her claims.
In a recent publication there, Konstantinou writes about the phenomenon of the Unmanned aerial vehicle, or more colloquially known as the drone, in combination with Adult Swim’s Infomercials (TV series) short, ‘’Fartcopter’’.