Waking up in a borrowed flat in Camden Town, Cayce Pollard, the heroine of Pattern Recognition, switches on an 'Italian floor lamp' powered by 'British electricity'. She pours some water - 'London tap water', as she later notes - through 'a German filter' into 'an Italian electric kettle', and seeks out a bag of 'imported Californian tea-substitute'. After a hasty Pilates session, she checks her watch - 'a Korean clone of an old-school Casio G-Shock' - and sees that it's time for her meeting with Bernard Stonestreet, an ad exec in 'a Paul Smith suit, more specifically the 118 jacket and the 11T trouser'. Cayce, by contrast, wears a 'museum-grade replica of a US MA-1 flying jacket . . . created by Japanese obsessives'. Afterwards there's lunch, 'the food California-inflected Vietnamese fusion with more than the usual leavening of colonial Frenchness'. Then, shouldering a handbag 'of black East German laminate, purchased on eBay', she steels herself for a mind-blowing trip to the pullulating 'logo-maze' of Harvey Nichols.

LRB 22 May 2003 | PDF Download