the AFR finds and tests the Entertainment

Fortier's bus-window vision is the samizdat's mission statement rendered as a cityscape: two-thirds of Boston inert, entranced, staring, "fouling their divans and the chairs which may recline." It's the attaché scaled to a metropolis — the Depend undergarment and the terminal recliner become the civic condition, whole darkened towers with only the blue flicker of entertainment equipment in the windows. The theme's private image of pleasure-death (one man in one chair, incontinent and rapt) is here the projected future of an entire population, and Fortier sees it the way an arsonist sees a dry forest: not as horror but as the thing already latent in a people built of sofas and eyes, waiting for the match.