'I am reading David Brooks's novel 'The Umbrella Club' with the help of Adorno's dialectic method, to trace the novel's philosophical movements. Thoughts which Brooks develops in 'Derrida's Breakfast' - where he interrogates philosophy and poetry from a vegan perspective - are explored in 'The Umbrella Club'; in fiction, ideas can play. Bringing the Frankfurt School thinker into this context may help readers to appreciate the theoretical sophistication of Brooks's writings, and to see his rejection of postmodern certainties not as return to a pre-post modern stance, but as a decisive moving ahead, into a new, compassionate aesthetics which do not shy away from the complexities of the philosophical tradition. Or, a floating ahead, driven by changing winds and vagaries of landscape as balloons will, yet ultimately reaching its destination, as balloons also do, sometimes, if one is persistent. After all, 'The Umbrella Club' is a gothic 1920s adventure tale.' (Publication abstract)