How I Became a Famous Novelist, By Steve Hely

A satire that hurts when you laugh

The publishing industry is ripe for satire. Precious literary authors, cynical bestseller-writers, clueless editors, hapless marketing staff, sycophantic hangers-on and vindictive book reviewers could all do with the rug being pulled out from under them – something which Steve Hely does here with gleeful abandon.

He has the honed comedy writing skills and high gag-rate you get from having worked on US TV shows such as American Dad and 30 Rock, and at times in this superbly entertaining novel, as he mercilessly lampoons target after target, I found myself almost crying with laughter. There is a spoof New York Times Bestsellers List on page 42 that is worth the cover price alone. (Sample title: The Jane Austen Women's Investigators.)

Our narrator is Pete Tarslaw who, when we meet him, is employed to knock together college application essays for semi-literate rich kids and foreign students. He decides to write a novel not because he has something to say, but because he sees the luxuriant ocean-view properties of bestselling writers in a Vanity Fair article, and because he wants to make his ex-girlfriend envious by arriving as a rich and famous author at her forthcoming wedding .

With the decision made, he begins to research the market, allowing Hely the opportunity to get stuck into every kind of bad book. But after weighing his options, Tarslaw decides to go down the "literary" route, since he won't have to concern himself with plot, and can cover everything in syrupy, vaguely meaningful lyricism. He concocts a series of superb rules: "Evoke confusing sadness at the end", "Must have scenes on highways making driving seem poetical". (This last one is to appeal to the market for audiobooks, most of which are listened to in cars.) And with these rules in place, he dutifully knocks out The Tornado Ashes Club, a hilariously awful and manipulative work about a grandson and grandmother on a road trip to scatter the ashes of a dead lover into a tornado, interspersed with Second World War flashbacks of the dead lover in the Mediterranean.

The Tornado Ashes Club looks like it will sink without trace until a Lindsay Lohan-type figure is seen hitting a member of the paparazzi over the head with a copy, and Tarslaw is rocketed into the mainstream. Hely then takes us on brief debunking trips around the realms of TV, film and celebrity culture, which are funny in their own right but don't quite match the cynicism and invective of the novel's earlier part.

When Tarslaw admits to being a fraud on live TV, he goes from famous to infamous overnight. Towards the novel's end, Hely gets to grips with his big theme – of authenticity; of cynicism versus "truth", whatever that is – and, it has to be said, rather pulls his punches. Nevertheless, this remains a deeply, often painfully funny book, and should be read by anyone with a passing interest in the state of modern literature.