"It's a novel in many voices," [Jonny] explains, "all of them mine: the character Jonny, the writer Jonny, and the miserable real-life Jonny."

As it stands, however, it's as if [Jon Paul Fiorentino], like Jonny, fears reckoning with the implications of the situation. Although that's possibly the point, if we believe that Jonny is the author's sometime mouthpiece. "I'm not very fond of things happening in stories," Jonny says early on. "Mine is a static literature."

Fiorentino, author of four volumes of poetry and the short-fiction collection Asthmatica, evidently can. He certainly does bits well: the comic strips "Helen Keller's Voice Mail" and "Dubious Toasts" are tastelessly hilarious, aided considerably by [Evan Munday]'s understated cartooning. Nor is Fiorentino without insight. What he needs to do next time is supply a final act.