All Writers Are Liars

Baker McCloud is a genuinely funny, genuinely sad creation — a man who genuinely believes 'Emotions flowed like hot molasses, oozing off the page' is a compliment to his own prose, and who in the same breath calls himself ahead of Van Gogh because he's sold 'a couple of dozen books' where Van Gogh sold one painting. Bruechle doesn't just mock him; he lets Edie's affection humanize him — 'she still thought of him as handsome' even as the word 'puffy' won't pop out of her head — so the satire never curdles into contempt. That double vision, contempt and tenderness held at once, is the book's real achievement.

The dialogue is where the characterization pays off hardest. Deena Betts's monologue — 'ya let that fuckin' hate well up and spill over... it was better'n sex' — is a genuine tonal risk: coarse, digressive, self-implicating, and it lands because the register never wavers into false poetry. Edie's courtroom voice (clipped, procedural, faintly weary) is a completely different instrument from McCloud's blustering self-justification, and the scene where he explains the 'brief' behind her thank-you note for the ugly jewellery is a clever, earned bit of characterization-through-argument rather than exposition.

The embedded parody of Flight is the book's cleverest structural gamble — sixty pages of overwrought MFA prose compressed into a few paragraphs of gleeful pastiche ('an imperfect annulet encircled by a halo of rubiginous gibber') — and it does the rare thing of being funny about bad writing without itself being badly written. This is a novel that knows exactly what it's satirizing.