Marking the teen-fiction debut of a frequent contributor to "Saturday Night Live's" "Weekend Update," this groundbreaking, hilarious, and surprising novel takes a smart, satirical look at one hapless student's first year at an Ivy League school.

"The map of Stutts University at the front of Gerber's (the Barry Trotter parodies) deeply irreverent farce outlines precisely what readers can expect. Buildings with names like the 'Center for the People Who Gave Us Money' are stationed around the main topographical feature, the Turbid River. The football stadium has been erected in a crater where the chemistry building once stood. A Midwestern striver named Hart Fox gains admission to this hallowed institution (think: Yale, the author's alma mater) by cutting a deal with Burlington Darling III, a classmate's father who's running for governor of Michigan. A wealthy Stutts alumni, Darling will get Hart in and pay his way so long as Hart keeps his son, Trip, a drunken doofus, out of the newspapers and off academic probation until Election Day. With Trip's 'deeply felt commitment to vandalism,' this is a tall order. Hart finds aides-de-camp in wheelchair bound — roommate Peter, and his first-ever girlfriend, Tabitha, a 173-year-old vampire. The plot caroms from one implausible catastrophe to the next, as Hart and Peter join the campus humor magazine ('a Sargasso Sea of immaturity and pop culture'), and run afoul of Trip's fraternity, Comma Comma Apostrophe, whose members wear 'beige sweatshirts with punctuation on the front.' There's something on nearly every page (cheating, crude sexual humor, nightly 'intoxiganzas') to offend the school's Puritan founders, but teens who think The Onion is America's best newspaper may well lap this up. Ages 14-up." Publishers Weekly (Copyright Reed Business Information, Inc.)