Strike up the band: there's a new R.L. Maizes (We Love Anderson Cooper; Other People's Pets) book, and it's breakout-novel time--or at least it should be. As a funny-pitiless look at the lengths writers will go to get published, A Complete Fiction deserves shelf space alongside Percival Everett's Erasure and Jean Hanff Korelitz's The Plot.
P.J. Larkin is a Denver-based writer who drives for a ride-share company to pay the bills. She has three unpublished novels to show for herself; regarding her third unsold manuscript, her agent explains, "The market is saturated with #metoo novels." When P.J. reads the Publishers Marketplace description of a forthcoming title by New York-based acquiring editor George Dunn, she notes that his book's storyline resembles that of her third novel, which she knows he read and rejected a year and a half earlier. All it takes is one social media post from P.J.--excerpt: "Your book sounds a lot like my book.... Not good enough to publish but good enough to steal?"--to upend George's life ("#CancelGeorgeDunn"), and eventually her own.
Those preparing to read A Complete Fiction might consider donning gardening gloves before cracking its cover: its pages are thorny with spirited digs at publishing-industry fickleness, cancel culture, virtue signaling, performative outrage, and extreme environmentalism (P.J.'s commitment is almost beyond Thunbergian). Maizes has written a satirical novel in which the only villains are the humorless, and throughout which a serious question percolates: Is there such thing as good writing that should never be shared with the world? --Nell Beram, author and freelance writer