Fox Executives Should Wear Tinfoil Hats Around This Guy

A little over three years ago, Jennifer Egan's Look at Me demonstrated the difficulty of writing satire in the 21st century, where our culture moves so fast that what seems ludicrous and over-the-top when you first type it out "doesn't seem funny and crazy" when it's finally published, as she told me; instead, "it seems like social commentary."

Likewise, in a week where "reality television" has brought us a former softcore porn actress reuniting with her birth parents, a staged romance between an over-the-hill actress and a hip-hop sideshow act, and (unless they edited it out) a drunk midget pissing in the corner, Erik Barmack's debut novel, The Virgin, which traces one contestant's path through a televised competition to be selected by a 26-year-old virgin, doesn't read as outrageous, but as an imaginative stew of moments we've seen on several different programs in the last year or two. Heck, it's even got a pretty good running parody of Television Without Pity.

Then again, being in-the-moment rather than twenty minutes into the future can be a strength, if you want to get at the character-driven drama beneath the satirical conceit. And though there's still some first-novel bumps, Barmack does have a pretty good grip on the two stories of transformation he wants to tell--the main narrative thread following contestant Jeb, who exerts his energy into creating and maintaining a phony persona for the cameras, and the shadow story of the virgin herself (although once the final revelations come out, her string of emails does become somewhat confusing in retrospect...) In any event, reading about reality TV certainly isn't going to rot your mind the way actually watching it will--and you can get the fictional equivalent of an entire season's storyline in the time it would take you to watch one program's extra-long season finale.