Murray is able to produce a look that is sneaky and frank at the same time. It is a look that gives equal credence to disaster and lecherous success. He says that in the old days of his urban entanglements he believed there was only one way to seduce a women, with clear and open desire. He took pains to avoid self-depreciation, self-mockery, ambiguity, irony, subtlety, vulnerability, a civilised world-weariness and a tragic sense of history – the very things, he says, that are most natural to him. Of these he has allowed only one element, vulnerability, to insert itself gradually into his program of straighforward lust. He is trying to develop a vulnerability that women will find attractive. He works at is consciously, like a man in a gym with weights and a mirrow. But his efforts so far have produced only this half sneaky look, sheepish and wheedling.
Don DeLillo, White Noise (1984)