Just after the 2008 election ended, as John McCain’s campaign devolved into leaked feuds and anonymous attacks, one story stood out. Fox News reported—according to campaign insiders—that Vice Presidential candidate Sarah Palin hadn’t known Africa was a continent.

A “McCain foreign policy adviser” named Martin Eisenstadt quickly took credit for the juicy leak. MSNBC’s David Shuster quickly repeated the claim on air, only to have to explain with embarrassment that the adviser in question never existed. And what had been a barely noticed prank discussed only a few blogs became a national story.

The New York Times exposed Dan Mirvish and Eitan Gorlin, a pair of filmmakers, as the culprits. Eisenstadt had morphed from a Rudy Giuliani supporter to an Iraq investment expert to a McCain campaign foreign policy adviser. He had his own think tank—the Harding Institute for Freedom and Democracy, in honor of the not-very-beloved conservative president—and a consulting firm, the Eisenstadt Group. He was even featured in a fake BBC documentary about “the last Republican.” Now, like the shameless shills they parody, Gorlin and Mirvish have turned their moment in the spotlight into a lucrative venture, with the inevitable book: I Am Martin Eisenstadt.

Eitan Gorlin

The Palin scoop wasn’t the first time Eisenstadt had fooled the media—reporters for both Mother Jones and the Los Angeles Times picked up his half-baked musings without bothering to Google the source. (The LAT’s Andrew Malcolm wrote a defensive, nearly incomprehensible correction.) Eisenstadt’s antics were just believable enough – a plan to put casinos in Baghdad’s Green Zone, an accusation that the Jonas Brothers are terrorists. His claim that made it to CBS News and Business Week. A lone liberal blogger, William Wolfrum, managed to do due diligence and figure out that Eisenstadt, his think tank, and his consulting firm don’t exist, their impressive internet presence notwithstanding. In a world where one half-baked idea from a random “strategist” is considered as good as any other, it almost didn’t seem to matter.

In I Am Martin Eisenstadt, the character is fleshed out just as carefully. The neoconservative child of liberal Jews, he worships political strategist Lee Atwater and cares far more about his own career than about the Republican Party. He’ll suck up to any Democrat who can get him on TV and dreams of cushy foreign consulting gigs. Wandering from open bar to open bar, he somehow stumbles onto the McCain campaign just in time to see its members turn on each other like langur monkeys. Eisenstadt inserts himself into every trivial highlight of the 2008 campaign—along with hearing and exposing Sarah Palin’s confusion about geography, he bought Palin’s fancy clothes, he helped get McCain on Saturday Night Live, he helped Obama win over the last superdelegate, he caught Eliot Spitzer at the Mayflower Hotel. But whenever the substantive policy work is being done, he’s off getting drunk at some embassy happy hour. Eventually he’s put into the metaphysical quandary of defending his own existence against vicious liberals who claim he’s a fake.

As irritatingly repetitive and self-absorbed as a true pundit’s memoir, Eisenstadt’s book is also meticulously detailed. The strategies of phantasmal softball teams and the sexual shenanigans of imaginary power players are recounted in detail, with diagrams. Real Washingtonians are also tossed in by the handful; if the idea of former Bush press secretary Dana Perino hooking up with former Homeland Security chief Michael Chertoff doesn’t make you laugh, this is not the book for you. I Am Martin Eisenstadt also dabbles in foreign policy, with crude portraits of former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak and other Middle Eastern officials shoehorned in. In one cute joke playing off D.C. narcissism, the names of all 535 members of Congress are listed in tiny print at the end of the index.

There wasn’t much humor in the long, angry 2008 election, and it’s nice to see some levity come out of it all. The exuberantly useless I Am Martin Eisenstadt is certainly more enjoyable than Sarah Palin’s bitter leftovers. But while the authors’ schemes exposed the laziness of the media and the ease with which unsupported rumors can become accepted facts, their book does nothing. Martin Eisenstadt is a good joke, but I Am Martin Eisenstadt is not really a good read. No one reading it will believe Eisenstadt is a real person. Like any good prank, he’s much more enjoyable in action than in retrospect.

Related Posts:

• The Believer‘s Fall Bounty
• Accidental Political Poets
• The Rumpus Book Club Interviews Andrew Foster Altschul

A self-help guru finds herself spiraling out of control. Her therapist and her best friend have moved away and, just when she has to start promoting her book on how to stay skinny, she’s gaining weight. What to do?

Write a book about it. The result: Susan Shapiro’s Speed Shrinking. It’s called a novel on the cover, but this book is really an awkward hybrid that falls somewhere between fiction and memoir. Shapiro and her protagonist, Julia Goodman, are both authors of book on conquering nicotine addiction (Lighting Up and Up in Smoke, respectively) with the help of a domineering therapist. Both are married to TV/film producers who threatened to write rebuttals to their memoirs. Both hate the book Why French Women Don’t Get Fat (called French Women Are Never Flabby in the fictionalized version). And both started to expand a little when their closest confidantes suddenly disappeared—just in time for the release of their books on conquering food addiction.

In an interview with Editor Unleashed, Shapiro explained that she started Speed Shrinking as nonfiction but her editor said “it wasn’t dramatic.” So she upped the weight gain and made the story a little bit busier. But not much. Covering a year in the life of a successful, happily married author who happens to be a little chubby, her resulting novel circles around a whole lot of nothing.

In Julia’s world, the controlling therapist and the best friend move away at the same time. On top of that, the (surprisingly sane) husband gets a job in Los Angeles. Having successfully given up cigarettes, pot, alcohol, bread and gum, she finds herself sinking back into bad habits—specifically, cupcake icing. (Loving descriptions of sugary topping are some of the most moving parts of the book.) With her new book on how to conquer food addiction out in a few months, a desperate Julia tries a series of shrinks to keep her weight under control—giving “speed shrinking” its clever double meaning.

Susan Shapiro

But Julia is so reflexively self-diagnosing that it’s hard for a reader to get a thought in edgewise. She and her father share “the same genetic addictive tendencies.” Her problems stem from parental neglect, growing up as the only daughter in a group of boys and then moving to New York instead of staying in the Midwest. She seeks out male therapists for the approval she never got from her father, and mentors younger authors to replace the daughters she never had. All of this is spelled out for us, and Shapiro doesn’t give Julia a chance to reveal herself as a full character. For all her aggressive strangeness, she’s the least interesting person in the book.

Even her food obsession, the central crisis of the novel, turns out to be something less than a crisis. Julia decides there’s nothing really wrong with her—she just wants to lose some pounds. “It appears the most original, radical, shocking stance I can take is to love myself while still wanting to weigh 128,” she says after another therapist refuses to be her diet doctor. Another tells her, “You look fine and your weight talk is superficial and trite.” It’s easy to sympathize.

Shapiro’s other characters come off a little better. Both the autocratic Dr. Ness and his replacement, the laidback Dr. Cigar, can actually be funny and genuinely surprising. Her affable husband isn’t particularly interesting, but his one-liners are a welcome relief from the whirling dervish inside Julia’s head.

Shapiro manages to rub together some entertaining drama when the old therapist betrays her and the new one gets uncomfortably close. And there are occasional flashes of human emotion in her interactions with her family. (The best friend is a selfish non-entity.) But these conflicts play out in a shallow pool, and Speed Shrinking is more concerned with up-to-the minute minutiae (Spanx, Facebook, Sarah Palin) that all but ensure it will go stale as quickly as a gourmet cupcake.

The book’s big joke is that Julia is a self-help guru that can’t help herself. Far from figuring everything out, she’s built up a fantasy of having been healed through addiction therapy when what she really got out of it was a publishing deal. Fittingly, her advice to all her struggling friends is to write a book. Maybe it worked the first time, or even the second. But as any recovering addict knows, sometimes it’s better to just say no.

Related Posts:

• This Fantasy Is Most Disturbing
• Should We All Commit Facebook Suicide?
• No Wi-Fi: A Very Short Q&A with Alan from Borderlands Cafe
• Sunday Political Links
• Notable New York, This Week 11/2 – 11/8

Women are nasty. They piss, and fart, and masturbate. They clean toilet seats with their vaginas and pull out tampons with barbeque tongs.

Well, at least they do in Wetlands, the very controversial German novel that has caused women to faint and carry sexually meaningful avocados. Author Charlotte Roche, a television host in Germany, says she was inspired by a douche discovered in a friend’s bathroom: “I began to think—my God, am I the only person left who doesn’t use pussy soap?”

Probably not. But women are so loathe to discuss their own bodily functions that anything is possible. Wetlands is Roche’s attempt to demolish such polite conventions. Her battering ram is Helen Memel, an 18-year-old high school student stuck in the hospital for anal surgery after an accident involving intimate hemorrhoid shaving. Helen espouses a cheerful promiscuity and a confident, casual attitude towards her body. Lying in pain on her recovery bed, she recalls the sexual escapades of her short life.

There’s a lot to recall. In an era of coy, sexless Twilight fantasies, Helen’s brazen (and bloody) seduction methods are invigorating. Instead of agonizing over, or even ignoring, her various flaws, she uses them to her advantage. Her favorite position, which she’s named “stuff your face,” puts the man’s nose in direct contact with the inflamed skin on her ass. “It’s a good way to test whether someone is serious about me,” she says.

Helen challenges herself to be the least inhibited one in the room, and likewise Charlotte Roche is engaged in a verbal one-upmanship with herself. She’s obviously having fun, and some of Helen’s filthy behavior is laugh-out-loud funny. The author picks away at taboos like scabs, and delivers the same mix of pain and satisfaction. Wetlands tenderly exposes the oozy, weird reality that most females keep to themselves—I’ll bet most readers will feel a pang of recognition at one or two of Helen’s disgusting habits—and then, when your guard is down, Roche sticks the knife in with something truly revolting.

Charlotte Roche

Readers who pick up Wetlands thinking it’s trendy porn will be sorely disappointed, and nauseated. While the narrator maintains that lax personal hygiene goes hand in hand with sexual satisfaction, her gross-out antics are not limited to the romantically motivated. She drinks vomit and infected ass-blood; she eagerly swallows the pus out of her blackheads. “I’m my own garbage disposal,” she explains. “Bodily secretion recycler.” While Helen herself is aroused by ingrown leg hairs, the average reader probably isn’t.

Helen is also hard to admire because she’s hastily drawn, full of inconsistencies that suggest lazy writing more than character depth. She gets upset when blood stains her hospital gown hours, despite having left a used tampon in an elevator. She strips for a dude she met at a fruit cart, but hides behind her bed to change. Her shallowness only makes her faults more apparent. Most questionable is Helen’s relationship with her family—we’re meant to understand that she’s obsessed with reuniting her divorced parents, but she despises her mother and has nothing to say to her father.

In interviews, Roche has presented her work as a straightforward manifesto against the excessively tweezed and trimmed, a “cri de coeur against the oppression of a waxed, shaved, douched and otherwise sanitized women’s world,” as the New York Times put it. But unless she’s being sly, this narrow self-interpretation is mystifying. Helen quite obviously has issues beyond the medical. “What can I do now to divert my attention from my numbing loneliness?” she asks herself. “As soon as I don’t have anything to do, I panic.” A vague childhood memory gives her troubling dreams and hallucinations. One German review compared the novel to The Catcher in the Rye—like Holden Caulfield, Helen has an unbending worldview built on a deeply flawed foundation. How could (or should) anyone see this mentally damaged woman as an inspiration?

Maybe Helen’s traumas are just Roche’s sick practical joke: repulsive mental territory to complement physical filth. Maybe the bad writing in Wetlands is irrelevant—maybe it’s meant to be taken as performance art, not literature. Maybe the feminist role model isn’t Helen but Charlotte Roche: a woman who dares to be vulgar and strange. Good on her for pulling it off, I guess, but readers expecting a novel and not a PR stunt will be left feeling kind of dirty.

Related Posts:

• Never Look Away
• What About Men?
• The Secret About
• The Rumpus Interview with Jennifer Lyon Bell
• Depressing Sex: An Essay in Pictures

Vigilante justice: the new counterculture. Until it gets, like, totally commercial. That’s the premise of DeLeon DeMicoli’s novel, Lick Me, a spunky murder mystery saddled down with dull culture critique.

Seth Barton is an underground rave promoter whose only ambition in life is to make enough money to turn his business legit. Lewis Tucker is his dickish best friend and partner-in-crime – at least until Barton meets Norah Parrish, an aspiring cosmetologist who has an annoying habit of dumping dead bodies at her new boyfriend’s parties. A rape victim who found the criminal justice system unsatisfactory, Parrish has developed a more direct way of dealing with predators, as well as a convenient method for testing out her sweat-proof makeup line. After catching her in the act, Barton decides to give up raves for the more satisfying high of righteous revenge.

As often happens with novels trafficking in pop culture, one problem with Lick Me is that the world DeMicoli describes no longer exists. Ecstasy, glow sticks, purple hair – it’s a counterculture, sure, but not the one of 2007. If not for dissonant references to iPods and Flight of the Conchords, Lick Me could (and probably should) take place a decade earlier. There’s even a ‘wigga’—a white guy who imitates black gangsters, in case your memory is fuzzy (see the 1998 song “Pretty Fly (for a White Guy),” by the Offspring).

But beyond this sense of anachronism, Lick Me lacks the accuracy necessary to good satire, cobbling together vague generalizations about suburban teen life with details that never ring quite true. The few targets he does hit have been rammed so many times, there’s little satisfaction in the win. America’s Most Wanted is exploitative? Cable news lacks substance? You don’t say!

“No matter what kinda alternative lifestyle I live, what culture I follow, eventually it’ll become mainstream. Goth used to be cool. Now it has its own store in the mall. Punk rock used to mean something. Now it’s a hairdo, a piercing in a weird spot. Hip-hop once changed my life. Now it’s a brand name for clothes, cell phones, and tennis shows.” Under this system, music genres are just interchangeable entry points into the in-crowd. It’s art as self-help. Barton complains that “nobody can enjoy art anymore,” but it doesn’t seem like he ever did. If this is the definition of a subculture, then a novel like Lick Me is partly to blame for ruining them, by transforming meaningful movements into content-free codes for cool.

It’s a shame, because when you get past the half-baked culture critique there’s some shameless, pulpy good fun to be had. DeMicoli’s shallow, goofy characters play off the bloody plot with a satisfying friction. After killing a rapist she has lured out of his car, Parrish “pulls out a compact and cracks it open to look at herself in the mirror. She pays close attention to her eyes, her cheeks, pushing them up with her fingers. She says, ‘My God, this is awesome. Look at this!’” Barton asks what she’s doing, only to be told, “‘What do ya think I’m doin? I’m testing my products out.’”

Barton complains that club kids are only identifiable by their looks, but DeMicoli’s aptitude for describing clothing and hair is one of the book’s strengths. And when he juxtaposes banal dialogue against the casual violence, Lick Me is laugh-out-loud funny. Tucker is a pitch-perfect asshole, down to the bleach-blond dreads. Harley Davison (the aforementioned “wigga”) has a droll, almost Zen style that’s far more appealing than the tired jokes pinned on him about grills and rap careers. Having abducted and tortured Barton, his main concern is alimentary: “I can’t wait to get waffles after this.”

But it’s Parrish, a do-gooder equally invested in makeup and murder, who is the novel’s most inspired creation, and her worldview serves as good advice for any writer: less talking, more ass-kicking.

Related Posts:

• The Lightning Came Without Rain
• The Green Arcade
• The Black Minutes
• Dreams of Sex and Stage Diving
• Misadventure