In this world, everything—love, hate, beauty, and art—is a commodity among other commodities. Frank Moretti’s house dazzles with its taste and opulence, a cornucopia of Etruscan mosaics, Aboriginal art, and works by Constantin Brancusi, Sean Scully, and Joan Miró: “every decoration working towards some greater whole” (128). Even women become commodities as Moretti talks of the other strippers he has employed “as though they were paintings that could be bought and sold” (136).

Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, loc. 361