One of the few books about writers that doesn't make me want to throw it across the room. The writers in this group are all kinds, from Grady, our narrator, who is constantly stoned and is unable to sort the wheat from the chaff in his over 2,000 page long novel (oh how many massive novels needed such an assessment!) to his student James who is a habitual liar and thief who writes with verve and intensity if not greatness (and is amusingly the type of novel that will sell) to the guest lecturer who semi-believes his tendency to screw up so he can write about it to Grady's other student, Hannah, who is clean living and hard working, published young (not many 20 year olds have published with The Paris Review) and who's only real fault is a schoolgirl crush on Grady.

In the course of things Grady's wife leaves him, his mistress is pregnant, he attends a half-korean passover, kills multiple animals and uses their corpses in disturbing/amusing ways and a not-too small number of thefts and bashing occur. What is surprising is how un-sitcom like the events happen to unfold. They are nearly all terrible decisions, but they are arrived at in an understandable series of poor judgment. For the zanyness of things, the people are understandable and their tragedy is deserved but you still want them to crawl out from under it. When in the end, Grady is served pleasant ending, it isn't a triumphant one, really, it is a broken one and it is the one that makes real sense.

What makes this book is that it is not a book about a writer, per se (though the main protagonist is, in fact, a writer) and while it is peppered with observations about different types of writers and has some thoughts about the process of writing, it is about very flawed people with their obsessions and indiscretions and many mistakes. That it relegated fiction to the telling of lies without making novelists into people that merely give the events of their lives different names (which far far far too many books do) is also quite a relief.