Jaime Bayly's seven novels published to date are first-person narratives that display an agile control of language (with an emphasis on oral characteristics) and reflect what one critic has termed ‘el pulso de su tiempo’. The aim of this chapter is to discuss this narrative style within the theoretical framework of US/Latin American/Peruvian postmodern debates and in the broader context of Bayly's work as a whole (television, self-marketing, profile in Lima), as well as Peruvian socio-political concerns. A consideration of postmodernism as a period or movement is immediately problematic in the case of Bayly/Peru – especially if it is defined in relation to postindustrial, post-colonial, consumer, media society in Jameson's terms – because industrialization in the country is still developing, wealth distribution is uneven and a large proportion of the population is excluded from the media and from consumerism through poverty and illiteracy. On the other hand, uneven development in Peru (boosted by the global cocaine market) has created glimpses of a new configuration of economics and consumerism centred on Lima – with the domination of multinational communications and entertainment companies such as Telefónica and Cinemark – which correlate with Jameson's ‘late capitalism’. The Lima of No se lo digas a nadie, Fue ayer y no me acuerdo and La noche es virgen is consistent with a postmodern definition of contemporary society in relation to social practices (modernization, consumer society) and in relation to technology and the media. Furthermore, this chapter will argue that Bayly's style itself is quintessentially postmodern and, to this effect, Bayly's work will be explored within the well-known (and much-debated) literary postmodern parameters of Ihab Hassan, the theoretical overview of Latin American writing by Santiago Juan-Navarro, the specific focus on the literary postmodernism of Peru by Raymond Leslie Williams (one of the very few critics to look at Peru at all) and Linda Hutcheon's exploration of the political and critical aspects of postmodern writing (what she terms ‘complicitous critique’).

A reading of any of Bayly's seven novels makes it difficult to deny the existence of a cultural postmodernism in Peru because his writing is postmodern à la lettre: every aspect of Bayly's narrative is constructed with style and marketing in mind.