I'm going to qualify this review by saying that if you're a writer, editor, agent, or work in some other capacity related to book-publishing, or even fleetingly familiar with the NY Times bestseller list, you'll instantly realize that this is satire is spot-on. It's also obscenely readable. I finished it in two days. The last book I read took a week and a half.

The premise is simple: Pete Tarslaw, a 20-something man with a hack job (writing for an essay mill) who hasn't recovered after being dumped by college girlfriend learns she is getting married. To get back at her, he decides to become a bestselling author so he can rub her nose in it at her wedding.

Once he has his quest, Pete starts analyzing bestsellers to figure out what makes them so popular. This "rags to riches" section is the first half of the book, and contains some of the funniest writing about books I've ever read. For example, he concocts his own bestseller list, with titles like “Cumin: The Spice That Changed the World,” “Indict to Unnerve,” “The Jane Austen Women’s Investigators Club” and “Sageknights of Darkhorn.”

I won't outline second section, "decline and fall," except to say that Tarslaw does write a bestseller, but things don't go the way he thinks they will. There's a pivot here, in that the dictates of the character and the story allow Hely less satirical latitude in the second half of the book.

Janet Maslin argues that "Mr. Hely doesn’t know how to end this book," but I disagree. It's not a perfect ending, and there's a character who performs a tiny bit of miniature deus ex machina, but those are small quibbles. By the end, Hely has managed to let Tarslaw grow as a character, and leave us with a bit a paean to good stories and good writing. More important, the whole story is a hell of a ride.