Coasting on Pretty

In this highly entertaining and hilariously backhanded collection of picaresque essays, a low-rent Hollywood dilettante recounts a gleefully turbulent year spent bouncing between Los Angeles and Portland, Oregon ("The Berlin of the I-5 Corridor"), on a desperate quest for what he craves and fears most: attention, self-respect, success, and laughably dysfunctional love affairs with neurotic men.

If you lost your job, got caught stealing Asia Argento's TV, and were subsequently tossed out by your Siamese cat-addicted movie-producer boyfriend all in one week, it might inspire a sincere re-evaluation of your life goals. And if the only job you could get was washing dishes in a Jewish deli because your alcoholic rabbi pulled some strings, you might think about a call to a career college.

But our arguably appealing hero doesn't scare so easily. Foxy, ruthless, and dense, he plows ahead, bouncing from one absurd comeback scheme (and man) to the next with the grace of a wrecking ball.

Whether engaging in carnal fisticuffs with a sex-crazed (and clinically insane) former soap star known only as "The Coat Check Rapist," having his perpetually shirtless, twenty-one year-old "assistant" try to drown him in a Koi pond, or possibly finding true love with a ferocious Brooklynite whose passion for karaoke is surpassed only by his fondness for drunken sex, this picaro leaves no stone unturned-and no personal or professional boundary uncrossed.

The road to redemption has never been fraught with such hot obstacles.