Much of this book is a big, fabulous, scabrous FUCK YOU. Gary Indiana is one of those who wakes by the dawn's early light in a state of perpetually enamoured disdain. His book kicks off wonderfully with our hero on the 1992 US campaign trail before he jets-off for a holiday in Hell -- at Stalag EuroDisney. The opening triumvirate ends in Branson, Missouri -- "town of the living dead" -- one of those Twilight Zone US hamlets suffocated between the twin peaks of Christ and Country: "the tightest little cultural sphincter you are likely to find in the United States". He goes on to describe a place with "no shadows".

Those and the best of the rest come from the Village Voice. Gary Indiana claims that nothing here -- not even his explicit and unusually gripping (sic) journey into the hard porn industry -- was written as provocation. "One writes essays," the introduction posits, "to discover what one really thinks."

Gary Indiana despises the cultural tsunami his fellow countrymen have visited upon France in the benign name of Uncle Walt. He's the natural ambassador for this one; a Kissinger of contempt. This naked display of blind and all-encompassing prejudice endears him immediately, galumphing into Marne-la-Villee with "a high degree of disgust and terror, a creeping fear of idiocy." He ranges about this plastic Oz looking for its conniving Wizard, wondering at stores that sell "anything with a flag on it except that Minnie Mouse Fuck Doll we've all been waiting for." He greets under-waged staffers who bemoan the American imperialist appropriation of the Euro fairy tale, and muses after the possibility of the Japanese inaugurating a Mid-Western MITSUBISHILAND USA. There is Disney and "there is nothing else". This he takes as a personal slight.

And yes, it is an obvious target. Just like Branson, Missouri is an obvious target. But then if you're an American surely you don't stand up unless you're prepared to be knocked down. Big. Gary Indiana chooses his rocks with care and aims them with skill. As a satirist he's out of Will Self far more than oh-so-funny fellow countryman P.J. O'Rourke. He claims to have "enjoyed getting hundreds of menacing phone calls from the inhabitants of Branson."

If this book is about discovering what one really thinks, then Gary Indiana soon realises that he really despises US politicians. He starts each section of Northern Exposure by quoting from the original Punk housewife herself, Patti Smith, then passes the next by finding new and thrilling ways to beat on the would-be electable. He draws comparison between "funny Mr Bill" and Preparation H: "something smooth and greasy and easy to dissolve in the collective rectum". A black enthusiast in an otherwise all white Pat Buchanan audience is caught "applauding feverishly, a true believer who will salt himself when they throw him into the stew pot." Buchanan is a "belligerent turd...a bigoted mick whose pathology runs to fag bashing and other symptoms of sexual hysteria." Fear and loathing on the campaign trail, indeed.

On and on and on. On the defence's electronic manipulation of the infamous Rodney King videotape: "It's rather like seeing the Zapruder film while someone explains how John F. Kennedy assassinated Lee Harvey Oswald." On Brit Booker Prize fiction: "still marvelling over the invention of the telephone." On those monumental naked shitters Gilbert and George: "All those icky images must be filtered through the damp handkerchief of Art... If you can't make it different, blow it up."

Pissed-off, jaundiced: "I am a student of chaos, absurdity, and life's little ironies." You can be forgiven for skipping some of the more obtuse reviews that back-end this book (like Greil Marcus, Gary Indiana can occasionally get just a little too puffed-up on himself) but the bulk of Let It Bleed is frankly mandatory.