Dennis A. Foster has written a wide ranging and eclectic account of perversity in American culture.  The core analysis focuses on American writers Edgar Allen Poe, Henry James, Don DeLillo and W.S. Burroughs, and British novelist J.G. Ballard, included for his continued interest in American society.  Foster also references a huge range of theorists, films, music, and other cultural phenomena to colour his arguments.  Throughout his text, he charts the darker elements of the American cultural psyche, especially the recurrence of Gothic and satire in the nation’s cultural history; these aspects, he argues, are not generally presumed American characteristics but are pervasive. 

Foster’s central argument, which gives the book its title, is that America as a nation is both sublime in terms of its size and perverse in terms of the lack of limitations it places upon itself.  In cultural representations of America, he isolates a cyclical relationship between perversity and the social constructs, such as nationalism, that keep this in check and, at the same time, thrive on this perversity.

Foster’s reading of cultural texts through psychoanalytical theory is engaging and convincing, and does seem to prove his theory that American society fulfils the compulsion for perverse pleasures.  However, his thesis that this compulsion is universal ignores issues of gender and ethnicity; his dismissal of Butler seems particularly hasty.  Moreover, his attempt to cover a huge quantity of material in the book’s slim 180 pages, coupled with the diversity of his references and the scope of the critical theorists he uses, can leave the reader reeling somewhat.  Nonetheless, this is an incredibly readable analysis of a fascinating element in American culture.