Take it from Pete Tarslaw: “Book reviewers are the most despicable,
loathsome order of swine that ever rooted about the earth. They are
sniveling, revolting creatures who feed their own appetites for bile by
gnawing apart other people’s work. They are human garbage.”

And if there’s one thing Pete Tarslaw knows, it’s garbage. He writes
it to earn barely a living at EssayAides, a business outside Boston
that ghostwrites college-application essays for students who are either
too dumb to write the essays themselves or too foreign-born to
understand basic English.

Pete Tarslaw’s also a loser of the overeducated variety: He’s smarmy
as hell, a real know-it-all. He drinks too much, broadcasts his
opinions on every subject in the book (including the subject of book
reviewers), plus he’s a failure in the romance department. But he gets
fired from EssayAides. And he learns that his successful ex-girlfriend
is getting married.

Time, then, for Tarslaw to get down to business, show that
ex-girlfriend, at her wedding reception, what real success looks like.
His goal: to get famous. And he does get famous by deliberately writing
a piece of garbage with bestseller written all over it. He calls it
The Tornado Ashes Club, and that’s the setup in Steve Hely’s
satire on the publishing industry called How I Became a Famous
Novelist (Black Cat).

Hely is a Harvard grad who went on to write for David Letterman and
the TV show American Dad, which makes him no slouch in the
smarmy department. These days, he’s a writer for 30 Rock. But do
you want yet another comic novel on the unfunny trials and tribulations
of successful slackerdom? How I Became a Famous Novelist will
have you feeding on your own appetite for bile.

For more on the subject of loserdom: Take it from a 25-year-old
musician. When make-or-break Sub Pop writes, you rejoice. As in:

“Dear Losers: This letter concerns your crummy demo tape. While it
leaves much to be desired, miraculously it isn’t as ear-piercingly
horrible as the other thousand we received that day. One song in
particular, ‘Black Smoke, No Pope,’ does not completely suck. Though we
can’t — for legal reasons — encourage you to continue
making music, this letter is intended to come infinitely close to that
point. Sincerely, Sub Pop Records.”

Bingo. Climactic scene and reason enough in It Feels So Good When
I Stop (Riverhead Books) for that 25-year-old musician to turn his
life around.

This is musician Joe Pernice’s debut novel, and it’s about, no
surprise, a slacker, but it’ll be news to readers to read that note
from Sub Pop five pages from finishing the book. Why? Because readers
will scarcely realize that the recipient of that note is a frustrated
musician.

What we do know is that the protagonist in It Feels So Good When
I Stop is hanging out during the off-season on Cape Cod, he’s been
roundly rejected by his girlfriend in Brooklyn, and he’s learning some
lessons in adulthood from the nephew he babysits. He’s learning more
lessons courtesy of an older woman with a dead child haunting her past.
This guy, true to form, also drinks a lot, and, true to form, his
personal hygiene leaves more than a lot to be desired.

What’s a musician with the talent of Joe Pernice doing writing about
such a predictable lowlife? And what’s a lyricist with the intelligence
of Joe Pernice doing writing dialogue that is just this side of
universally potty-mouthed?

I don’t know. But it’s making the idea of even opening Benjamin
Anastas’ 1998 novel, described by its paperback publisher, Dial Press,
as “corrosively funny,” about the last thing this piece of human
garbage wants to dig into. The book’s called An Underachiever’s
Diary.