‘Famous Writers I Have Known,’ by James Magnuson

Feeling like a fraud or a con artist can be a hazard of the writing profession; there’s a fine line, Balzac wrote, between the artist and the criminal. That’s certainly true of Frankie Abandonato — a New York grifter who makes the critical error of pulling a lottery scam on a mobster. Abandonato, the hero of James Magnuson’s novel “Famous Writers I Have Known,” slips town for Texas, holing up at a creative writing institute where he’s mistaken for a J. D. Salingeresque recluse named V. S. Mohle. (The real Mohle was expected on campus to teach a seminar while either reconciling or settling an old score — it’s complicated — with the institute’s fabulously successful founder, Rex Schoeninger, whose sprawling social novels are reminiscent of James Michener’s; their feud culminated years ago in a brawl on “The Dick Cavett Show,” after which Mohle dropped out of society and never published again.)

The novel’s screwball premise suggests a mash-up of an academic comedy by David Lodge and a wisecracking Elmore Leonard caper. Its title and its author’s day job — Magnuson, the author of eight previous novels, directs the James A. Michener Center for Writers at the University of Texas — promise a knowing satire of academia and the literary world. As semiliterate Frankie passes himself off as Mohle, Magnuson spoofs the process of evaluating stories in writers’ workshops. “I drew arrows and circled paragraphs, slashed Zorro-like Z’s through long passages of dialogue,” Frankie says. “By the time I finished, some of the pages looked like the freeway maps to downtown L.A.” It comes as little surprise that Frankie proves effective as a writing instructor, or that both the mob and the real V. S. Mohle ultimately catch up to him — he’s narrating the story, after all, from prison.

The novel is breezy and diverting enough, but as satire goes, it’s pretty mild-mannered. Magnuson’s lampoon of writing programs lacks the venom and specificity that, say, Francine Prose brought to similar material in “Blue Angel.” And his characterization of Schoeninger, “best-selling author of all time, philanthropist, champion of education,” resembles a tamer version of the hero from “The Neal Pollack Anthology of American Literature.” Midway through the story, as Frankie learns more about Schoeninger’s personal life and we learn more about Frankie’s past (the name Abandonato seems, frankly, too cleverly chosen), Magnuson appears less interested in mocking his profession than in eulogizing a lost era, when authors loomed larger in the pop culture firmament and literary feuds seemed more important than they do now. The result can feel like the novelistic equivalent of a grudge match between Robert De Niro and Sylvester Stallone, rehashing an outdated “minimalist versus maximalist” argument via authors who were already long past their prime by the book’s setting of 1997. (Magnuson probably settled on that year because it’s when Michener died, although he might have been more careful to avoid anachronistic references to, among other things, the Cadillac Escalade and the literary magazine Tin House.)

Then again, what is book criticism but another con game, using literary evidence and textual references to give the reader the illusion of authority? And why should you heed the opinion of a reviewer who’s probably no more reliable than Frankie Abandonato — and who, in his first sentence, invented a quotation and attributed it to Balzac, assuming you would trust he was telling the truth?