So, yesterday was the official kick-off of the Keep Portland Weird festival here in Paris, which meant that I had a reading/screening in the...
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A slacker dude decides the best way to get money and women is to write a bestselling novel — which he does. This is a flawless, hilarious satire of the book industry, and anyone who works in it should read this book. Hely is a writer for David Letterman, and it sure shows. Perfect. Recommended by Dianah, Powell's Books at PDX
Synopses & Reviews
Publisher Comments:
What Pete Tarslaw wants is simple enough: a realistic amount of fame that will open new avenues of sexual opportunity; the kind of financial comfort that will allow him to spend his life pursuing hobbies such as boating or skeet shooting at his stately home by the ocean or a scenic lake; and — perhaps most importantly — the chance to humiliate his ex-girlfriend at her wedding. This is the story of how he succeeds in getting it all, and what it costs him in the end.
Narrated by an unlikely literary legend, How I Became a Famous Novelist pinballs from the post-college slums of Boston, to the fear-drenched halls of Manhattan's publishing houses, from the gloomy purity of Montana's foremost writing workshop to the hedonistic hotel bars of the Sunset Strip. The horrifying, hilarious tale of how Pete's "pile of garbage" called The Tornado Ashes Club became the most talked about, blogged about, read, admired, and reviled novel in America will change everything you think you know about literature, appearance, truth, beauty, and those people out there, somewhere in America, who still care about books.
Review:
First, please know that the bloated, pretentious, overly adjectival sentences I'll be citing from "How I Became a Famous Novelist" are the deliberately atrocious faux fiction of narrator Pete Tarslaw, America's foremost literary opportunist. Those very bad quotes assured me that I was in very good hands, starting with the book's epigraph from "The Tornado Ashes Club," Pete's hoped-for... Washington Post Book Review (read the entire Washington Post review) ticket to literary renown: "In strewn banners that lay like streamers from a longago parade the sun's fading seraphim rays gleamed onto the hood of the old Ford and ribboned the steel with the meek orange of a June tomato straining at the vine." "You have to understand how bad things were for me back then," the book begins, winning me a second time with its hint that Pete may not be the cad and charlatan that his fondest literary goal — to craft best-selling garbage — suggests. He has been writing fiction of another sort, for EssayAides, a service for wealthy kids that turns their gibberish into polished college application essays. "They'd send you something about how "Anchorman" or the golf team had changed their lives. I'd ... change Will Ferrell to Toni Morrison, and golf to learning woodworking from a Darfur refugee." One propitious and beery day, Pete watches his favorite TV journalist, hot Tinsley Honig, interview best-selling novelist Preston Brooks, the overly acclaimed author most recently of "Kindness to Birds." (I laugh even as I type that.) It isn't so much the man himself who captures Pete's attention as his audience, the "young women in little sweaters and tight jeans, pliant and needy" who react to lines such as "slowly her fingers, rich in texture as a knitted throw rug, fitted into Gabriel's palm, stained by motor oil and bacon grease." Pete figures he, too, could construct some "intricate latticework of literary sewage." After all, he notes, "If you could write a book and act like you meant it, the reward was a country estate and supple college girls." And he has a more pressing goal: humiliating his lost love, Polly, whose wedding invitation he has unadvisedly accepted. If as successful as he hopes, he "would walk in wearing a suit I'd paid someone to pick out for me. At the bar I would order something writerly, perhaps naming a Scotch they didn't have." How to fast-track fame and fortune? Go to the bookstore and take notes. "People like love that crosses the years, funny workplaces, goofy dads who save Christmas, laser battles, whiny hags who marry charming Italians, and stylish detectives." Also remunerative: World War II, coffee, dogs, weather, Christianity, babies, plant names, secrets, promises, faintly heard songs and blue-collar touches. To his dismay, Pete discovers that writing a thriller is hard work. "It's easy at first, describing your hero's monumental chin and iron-core integrity and so forth. ... (But) every page has to be interesting and full of guns and veiled threats and snappy retorts. It's exhausting." Soon, with a photo of Preston Brooks shoeing a horse taped above his desk for inspiration, Pete changes course. "With literary fiction ... you can just cover everything up with a coat of wordy spackle. Those readers are searching for wisdom, so they're easier to trick." And trick he does, employing all the touchstones of mannered prose. "Luke gazed around the stout knotted walnut table at his new comrades: azure-eyed Marcel, Guillaume of the quizzical smile, Lavroche with his cheeks seared by knife wounds." His editor loves it. "Really owning earnestness," he gushes. To author Steve Hely, nothing is sacred and all is skewered: critics, Hollywood, MFA programs, students, literary journals, panels, conferences and resulting hook-ups. The cynicism is delicious, the humor never broad, with just enough modesty and conscience seeping into the story to make our con artist lovable. I was sold, and sold again, jotting "eye" and "ear" next to my favorite lines, shorthand for yet another perfectly observed slice of life captured and condensed into a subtle zinger. "I've never read 'The Brothers Karamazov.' I hear good things," Pete confides. Just when I thought there couldn't be anything left to mock in Hely's bag of tricks, along came another brilliant passage mimicking, for example, a scathing review of "The Tornado Ashes Club," a fake reproduction of the New York Times Best Sellers list (at No. 7: "A Whiff of Gingham and Pecorino"), a wedding toast, a fiction workshop discussion and an Oprah interview with adopted Vietnamese orphan Ellen Krapowski, discussing her memoir, "The Luckiest Polack in Chicago." "How I Became a Famous Novelist" is a cheeky book and a brave one, all but naming real-life literary emperors sans clothes. Hely is a Harvard Lampoon alum, so his brashness doesn't surprise. What does surprise is this novel's moments of sweetness. After all, the narrator's rude thoughts and crude ambition are fueled by lost love. I rooted for Pete, a scheming underachiever whom the late great humorist Max Shulman would have been proud to call his own. I may have read a funnier book in the last 20 years, but at this moment I'm hard-pressed to name it. Reviewed by Elinor Lipman, whose latest novel is 'The Family Man', Washington Post Book World (Copyright 2006 Washington Post Book World Service/Washington Post Writers Group)
(hide most of this review)
Review:
"A satiric, facetious and laugh-out-loud funny first novel." Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
Review:
"In a satirical novel that is a gag-packed assault on fictitious best-selling fiction, Mr. Hely...takes aim at genre after genre and manages to savage them all....His complaints about such books are very funny. They'd be even funnier if they weren't true." Janet Maslin, The New York Times
Review:
"Hely...slams the writing, publishing, bookselling, and book-reviewing world in a funny, thought-provoking, cynical story about being successful for all the wrong reasons." Library Journal
Review:
"[Hely's] hilarious set pieces take aim at such fish-in-a-barrel subjects as the publishing industry, MBA authors, book expositions, author forums, and general-fiction readership. But it will delight fans of loser lit novels such as Philip Roth's Portnoy's Complaint (1967) and Michael Chabon's Wonder Boys (1995)." Booklist
Review:
"Steve Hely...has written a clever and, for all I know, trendsetting novel. Tarslaw is one condescending dude before his baptism of light in Marfa, but an interesting and memorable character." Dallas Morning News
Review:
"Hely has put together a book that so perfectly and hilariously skewers the publishing industry, it's amazing that he could find anyone to print it. It's time to prove we're smarter than the book business thinks we are and make his novel as big a hit as The Da Vinci Code." The New York Post
Review:
"A hilarious send-up of literary pretensions and celebrity culture....Will hit close to home for publishers, writers, and readers." USA Today
Synopsis:
Narrated by an unlikely literary legend, this work moves from the post-college slums of Boston to the fear-drenched halls of Manhattan's publishing houses and tells the horrifying, hilarious tale of how one man's self-described pile of garbage novel becomes the most talked about book in America.
Steve Hely writes for the Fox animated comedy American Dad! He was twice president of The Harvard Lampoon, and has been a writer and performer on Last Call with Carson Daly and a writer for The Late Show with David Letterman, the latter earning him an Emmy Award nomination for Outstanding Writing for a Variety or Comedy Show.
brwhite, January 1, 2011 (view all comments by brwhite)
This book was a very funny commentary on cutting corners and authenticity. I loved it, or at least it hit me just right.
Shoshana, May 31, 2010 (view all comments by Shoshana)
Amusing, light, and fun if you sometimes wonder why your friends are raving about some piece of unfortunately published fluff or drek. I found it enjoyable until near the end, which I thought was rushed and the protagonist's epiphany unearned.
Was this comment helpful? | Yes | No (4 of 6 readers found this comment helpful)
MollyGee, January 8, 2010 (view all comments by MollyGee)
A brilliant publishing-industry satire, this is a great read with hilarious forays into Hollywood adaptation-land and earnest Iowa Writers Workshop type MFA programs.
Was this comment helpful? | Yes | No (2 of 5 readers found this comment helpful)
How I Became a Famous Novelist
Used Trade Paper
Steve Hely
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0 reviews
$5.95
In Stock
Product details
224 pages
Grove Press -
English9780802170606
Reviews:
"Staff Pick"
by Dianah,
A slacker dude decides the best way to get money and women is to write a bestselling novel — which he does. This is a flawless, hilarious satire of the book industry, and anyone who works in it should read this book. Hely is a writer for David Letterman, and it sure shows. Perfect.
by Dianah
"Review"
by Kirkus Reviews (starred review),
"A satiric, facetious and laugh-out-loud funny first novel."
"Review"
by Janet Maslin, The New York Times,
"In a satirical novel that is a gag-packed assault on fictitious best-selling fiction, Mr. Hely...takes aim at genre after genre and manages to savage them all....His complaints about such books are very funny. They'd be even funnier if they weren't true."
"Review"
by Library Journal,
"Hely...slams the writing, publishing, bookselling, and book-reviewing world in a funny, thought-provoking, cynical story about being successful for all the wrong reasons."
"Review"
by Booklist,
"[Hely's] hilarious set pieces take aim at such fish-in-a-barrel subjects as the publishing industry, MBA authors, book expositions, author forums, and general-fiction readership. But it will delight fans of loser lit novels such as Philip Roth's Portnoy's Complaint (1967) and Michael Chabon's Wonder Boys (1995)."
"Review"
by Dallas Morning News,
"Steve Hely...has written a clever and, for all I know, trendsetting novel. Tarslaw is one condescending dude before his baptism of light in Marfa, but an interesting and memorable character."
"Review"
by The New York Post,
"Hely has put together a book that so perfectly and hilariously skewers the publishing industry, it's amazing that he could find anyone to print it. It's time to prove we're smarter than the book business thinks we are and make his novel as big a hit as The Da Vinci Code."
"Review"
by USA Today,
"A hilarious send-up of literary pretensions and celebrity culture....Will hit close to home for publishers, writers, and readers."
"Synopsis"
by Ingram,
Narrated by an unlikely literary legend, this work moves from the post-college slums of Boston to the fear-drenched halls of Manhattan's publishing houses and tells the horrifying, hilarious tale of how one man's self-described pile of garbage novel becomes the most talked about book in America.
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