Deep Surfaces explores the relations between mass culture - especially as reflected in and perpetuated by film, television, and advertising - and historical thinking in the work of such contemporary American novelists as Thomas Pynchon, Don DeLillo, E. L. Doctorow, Ishmael Reed, Bobbie Ann Mason, and Nicholson Baker. By considering mass culture from a postmodern theoretical perspective, Philip E.

Simmons places his readings of fiction within a larger argument about how mass culture is shaping postmodern conditions of knowledge. In particular, Simmons shows how mass culture is related to the ways we construct and perceive history, and how certain developments in fiction mark the novel's participation in a larger mass culture.