Book Review: How I Became A Famous Novelist by Steve Hely

By Amanda Griswold

Hely’s parody of the publishing world, How I Became A Famous Novelist (Grove Press, 2009) is utterly entertaining but equally unsatisfying. What begins as a satirical romp through the Mardi Gras of literary pop-culture ends right where it began, with a delicious sense of sacrilege and a terrible hangover. Hely has all the right ingredients for comedic success: an archetypal anti-hero, rapid-fire humor, a shocking lack of decorum and dead-on criticism. I can’t deny being thoroughly engaged and entertained. Hely ridicules the ghosts-of-publishing-past and current publishing giants alike, from William Shakespeare to Nicholas Sparks, Alexander Pope to James Patterson. Yet it’s difficult to explain why, after 322 pages of this colorful Bahktinian carnival, I felt drained and over-indulged.

Hely’s protagonist, Peter Tarslaw, is an idiot savant who ghostwrites college application essays for a living, drinks himself to sleep and then substitutes beer bottles for chamber pots. Trust me, Hely gets plenty of comedic mileage out of poor hygiene, awkward encounters and bodily fluids. Tarslaw decides to write a best seller in order to fulfill his 4 simple, well defined goals: 1) enough fame “to open new avenues of sexual opportunity,” 2) wealth enough to “spend rest of [his] life lying around,” 3) an impressive estate with “HD TV, discreetly placed,” and 4) to humiliate his ex-girlfriend, Polly, at her wedding.

Hely writes his best seller (and Tarslaw’s fictitious one) with an uncanny instinct for exactly what it takes to write a terrible but financially successful novel. I enjoyed the book in spite of myself and couldn’t help the occasional smirk. Hely’s parody of the New York Times’ Best Sellers list is critical genius. He invents fictional novelists by cleverly disguising and conglomerating contemporary best sellers and saves his sharpest satire to wield against long-dead writers who, conveniently, can’t sue. The fake excerpts from Tarslaw’s novel interwoven into the text are brilliantly awful. As New York Times reviewer Janet Manslin suggests, “Steve Hely needed to know how to write very well in order to write as miserably as he does in ‘How I Became a Famous Novelist.’”

Undoubtedly. But (and it’s a big ‘but’) by the novel’s conclusion, I didn’t believe him. Sure, Hely can skewer Melville, cut Faulkner to pieces, and dismember Steinbeck with a physician’s precision. The scope of his criticism is almost dizzying: publishing houses, editors, agents, writers, academia and Hollywood are all at a loss. In the end, the novel’s critical humor deflates and Hely is left with his suddenly exposed parody in pieces. The central problem, according to Tarslaw’s editor and friend, Lucy, is that people can no longer distinguish good writing from bad writing, if the distinction even exists. So, Hely, the man behind the curtain, puts on a semi-serious air, slaps on an ambiguous “literary” ending and sends his manuscript off to the publishers to become a real-life famous novelist.

It worked. Hely’s parody is still selling strong and stirring conversation. He knows the emotionally manipulative writing that floods the market and can imitate it impressively. Yet the novel ends with an odd nostalgia for sincerity and for literature that can transcend commercialism. It’s a stay against chaos that Hely can’t provide and perhaps won’t even attempt. The result is entertaining but ultimately unsatisfactory. That Heley’s humor peters out is less disappointing than that his book is yet another ambiguous, though not wholly undeserving, commercial success.