Andrew Lewis Conn (O, Africa!) sets his mischievous third novel, I Swore I'd Burn This Book, in 2009, but the despair over the state of American reading habits that runs through its spine still rings familiar. For narrator Dmitri Boris Godunov, the preponderance of "ghostwritten pop-star pap, voyeuristic true-crime butchery, YA illiteracy, and... adult coloring books" threatens to render him penniless. Not that he's the brains behind the Godunov literary estate--that would be his late father, Vladimir, a Russian immigrant to the United States whose novels took the 20th century by storm. Most notorious among them is Annabeth's Limbs, a serially celebrated and decried work of fiction about a 12-year-old girl's rape by her "angel-tongued, beetle-browed European stepfather."
If this Vladimir calls to mind another, then Conn has calibrated his keen sense of satire impeccably. "What to do with a body of work teeming with some of the most limpid language ever committed to English," Dmitri muses, "when fully a third... is predicated on the discomfiting theme of pedophilia?" Indeed, faced with indigence, evidence about his father's alleged improprieties, and a biographer with an axe to grind against the Godunov name, what is a failson to do? The obvious answer for Simon Graves, the Godunovs' literary agent, is to resurrect Vladimir's unfinished final novel, The Tyrant Cantos. It's a lucrative prospect undercut by just how incomplete the project actually is, not to mention Dmitri's oath to destroy the small stack of note cards, which bear only a faint whiff of Vladimir's genius.
I Swore I'd Burn This Book is at once homage to and a skewering of the male novelists whose influence on literature continues to spark debate. Conn's blundering narrator is unrestrained in his self-laceration, but he reserves his purest hatred for Gary Charsky, his rival, his father's former assistant, and the author of the forthcoming biography. Their repartee is as vicious as it is vulgar--petty and puerile yet erudite and insightful--as they clamor to have the final word on the Godunov legacy. Because it's in words themselves where Conn finds the greatest pleasure--words in service of an unforgettable voice. "The most insistent of literary devices, first person proposes a mode in which voice is everything," reads one of numerous footnotes riddled throughout the madcap quest to save Vladimir's reputation from ruin. Equally adept with literary references and dick jokes, sometimes in the same breath, Dmitri proves to be a trenchant emissary for the titans of yesteryear. And his growth may inspire many a pessimist to realize along with him, "It's never been a better time to be a book!" One of Conn's, especially. --Dave Wheeler, senior editor, Shelf Awareness
Shelf Talker: Satirist Andrew Lewis Conn takes mischievous aim at the frantic maneuvers behind the preservation of a literary titan's legacy from tarnishment.