THEY SAY THAT capitalism is capable of appropriating any dissenting movement, any opposition, neutralising it and turning it on its head. So everything that starts as anti-branding and anti-label becomes a brand itself. Look at Muji. Or look at McSweeney’s.

A magazine begun by Dave Eggers (of A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius fame) to publish stories rejected by others, it featured some outstanding work by a set who swiftly became a clique themselves: David Foster Wallace, Rick Moody, A. M. Homes, Heidi Julavits, Jonathan Lethem, William T. Vollmann. It gave voice to a different sensibility, not just in fiction but also in design, editorial practices, generic boundaries and horizons.

But different can be different only for so long before it becomes a tic; McSweeney’s frenetic chasing of the outré in its search for originality is beginning to look exhausted and empty. How does one explain the comb in an inner sleeve of McSweeney’s 16?

The book is a nest of flaps and folds containing two books, the comb and, don’t laugh, a deck of 15 cards — 13 hearts that can be read in any order, with a beginning and end that must be read at the start and finish. The cards are a story, Heart Suit, by the veteran Robert Coover. Someone should tell him “been there, done that” and buy him the T-shirt; this trick is very tired.

Of the books, one is wholly given over to a story by Ann Beattie entitled Mr Nobody At All. Once again, there is an attempt to galvanise a hoary old trope — several friends and relatives reminiscing about a dead character at a memorial — but it is only intermittently successful.

There is better work in the other book. Kevin Moffett’s The Medicine Man, perfectly pitched and perfectly written, tells the sad story of a manic-depressive mentally retarded young man’s attachment to his sister. Pia Z. Ehrhardt’s Driveway is a bleak, finely calibrated and restrained story of mothers, wives and the end of marriages and relationships.

But McSweeney’s 17 is where things start getting tricky, in all senses. Designed as a rubber band-bound collection of junk mail and subscription magazines, it is an elaborate spoof of several things. One publication is a faux-academic journal entitled Yeti Researcher: The Magazine of the Society for Cryptic Hominid Investigation. There are two catalogues, one for clothing, one for sausages, that send up the culture of mail order shopping and, beyond it, the larger malaise of a society gagging on its gullibility and consumerism. One story comes prefaced with a charity junk mail letter. There is an art magazine that claims to send subscribers reproductions of contemporary artworks. And only one small booklet of stories, with punctuating photographs of soft organs such as kidneys and unidentifiable bloody flesh.

Faced with a publication of this sort, in which the stories constitute less than a quarter of the whole, a reviewer is entitled not to bother with them. The stories don’t seem to be the point, the in-jokes, send-ups and laboured satires are. If this is subversion, it is of an affluence that knows it can waste resources in pursuit of such aimless, arid gimmickry.

It’s time to call its bluff. It’s time that someone piped out that Dave Eggers has no clothes on.

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