Nimble prose and an ironic but not smart-alecky stance keep this story moving along nicely--a promising start.

Placing celebrities like Charlie Rose and Ben Affleck in fictional situations and providing false footnotes, Altschul playfully and humorously delivers his novel in a pseudo-documentary style while exploring the serious themes of truth, group hysteria, and the transience of human existence. Regrettably, he elevates his characters' emotions to such a maniacal and operatic level that their resulting behavior may annoy some readers. An optional purchase for public and academic libraries.

Altschul might be accused of self-indulgence, since reading a 500-page satire of a pretentious literary biography can sometimes feel as painful as reading a real one; he does, however, display a cutting wit and a real feel for the strange turns of modern celebrity

Over the course of nearly 600 pages, Altschul registers some razor-sharp cultural observations and executes some thrilling high dives (the character named Andrew Altschul's sessions with a Lacanian analyst in particular). But the book's tricky PoMo narrative is bloated with gee-whiz grad-schoolisms, and storytelling takes a backseat to indulgence throughout.