Twilight is a book that has been written dozens of times before. It’s part of a great tradition of American writing, the rangy, pop diagnostic manual of Our Current Predicament. These are books of lofty, multidisciplinary ambition that are meant to theorize the tectonic shifts underfoot for as many readers as possible. Their measure isn’t whether they’re right or wrong, but whether they begin to successfully colonize the way their readers decode everyday life. Their observations begin to seem intuitive and obvious. Everything seems like a bogus publicity stunt after you read Daniel Boorstin’s The Image, for example, just as Christopher Lasch’s Culture of Narcissism makes you notice just how needy and coddled everyone else is. (Not you, of course. Everyone else.)