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The Bellybutton Fiasco by Tom Bissell and Webster Younce
This floridly wretched work is the creation of two young book editors (one a Salon contributor) who wrote an article for Harper's magazine arguing that Xlibris and other for-fee online "publishers" are in fact exactly the same as old-fangled vanity presses. To prove their point, they concocted this intentionally bad book (subtitle: "A Fictional Novel"), making it an amalgam of all the dreadful elements familiar to slush-pile readers everywhere. Xlibris was happy to "publish" it, though as the authors pointed out in Harper's, there's a big difference between actually publishing a book and just printing it. And there's a big difference between the average digital vanity press novel (with which Salon Books is, alas, pelted) and "The Bellybutton Fiasco," a really pretty funny mess of a book. It's what you might call a coming-of-age thriller about a sensitive young boy in the throes of first love who discovers that he has the power to shoot flames out of his navel. Not that the authors stick very close to the story line, though. There are a lot of blistering movie reviews, and a hilarious passage in which Bob Costas and Doug Collins commentate on the Trojan War. There are parodies of earnest protests against irony ("But it gets old -- this knowingness. It wears a mask that eats its own face") and of bad sensitive literary fiction. Plus, it contains a review of itself. And all of this can be yours if you click here.
-- Laura Miller
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