"Pocket Kings," by Ted Heller It's postmodern, not to mention a little scary, to write a review for The New York Times about a fictional memoir in which the protagonist, a failed novelist who has "never excelled at anything," fantasizes about assassinating the reviewer who "shoved" his novel "through a high-speed shredder in the Sunday Times." But this review is not a shredder, and we all know that fictional characters almost never resemble the authors who invent them, right? Franklin W. Dixon, the protagonist of Ted Heller's "Pocket Kings," has the misfortune to share his name with the pseudonymous crew of authors who wrote the Hardy Boys mystery series. In a footnote, he reflects, "I wouldn't be the first to cash in on a famous name (look at Leicester Hemingway, Joanna Trollope, Auberon Waugh, Martin Amis, Zoë Heller, Kate Chopin and way too many others)." This may be a good place to mention that Ted Heller is the son of the novelist Joseph Heller, author of "Catch-22." Dixon (the protagonist, not the Hardy Boys collective) has already published two novels. The first, a dark and, "according to the U.K."s Observer, . . . "masterfully ugly and unsettling" " Patient Zero story called "Plague Boy," earned favorable reviews in most places, "with the exception of The New York Times and Time and The Boston Globe." The second, an equally morbid narrative titled "Love: A Horror Story," was a bona fide flop, signifying, if not the end of Dixon's career, then the beginning of a midlist middle age. Though the basic premise of "Pocket Kings" is familiar - just look back a few years to novels like Steve Hely's "How I Became a Famous Novelist" and too much of Philip Roth's work to name - it has never been treated with as bilious an acid as this. You may want to keep a bottle of Pepto-Bismol on hand while you're reading. As the story opens, Dixon has completed a new novel called, appropriately enough, "Dead on Arrival," which centers on a "suburban married man bored to numbness, into fantasy football." One day his wife "purposely drives her car, with both kids in the back, off a cliff. Hilarity and high jinks ensue. Dixon believes the book will resurrect his career. "The Times would have to review "D.O.A.," " he reflects. "They might love it or hate it (probably hate it, as the book doesn't begin with a sentence like "In the small village in which my grandmother was born, the giant men flew down from the violet mountain mists after every monsoon season to take our women away"), but they'd have to give it notice." His agent has a different take, however, informing him the book will be "an impossible sell for women, who read 97.5 percent of all fiction." In denial about market forces and desperate to conceive a second act, Dixon spends half of this memoiristic novel (a "novmoir" or "memvel," as he calls such books, which he both envies and despises) stalking his agent, who has stopped returning his calls, and the other half pursuing easy money on a Web site called Pokergalaxy.­com, where, he says, "the world is a Sunday best-seller list and every weekend I am Mitch Albom." Using the online handle "Chip Zero," he builds his bankroll up to half a million dollars before encountering an elaborate, hilarious con. Though Heller's rendition of online poker is passably accurate and highly entertaining, the most memorable parts of "Pocket Kings" ruthlessly deconstruct the mechanics of the literary sausage factory. Happy poker players are all alike; every unhappy writer is unhappy in his own way. In the paranoid, hyper-­testosterone-charged universe Heller has built, every bookstore is an abattoir, with icky literary bits strewed all over the tables: " "Truckstop Tranny Crack Whore!" " Dixon reports from the Barnes & Noble at Union Square. " "Babes in Gangland!" My Holocaust Wolf Baby Wife! Could the other customers in the store see the pints of clammy envy oozing out into the armpits of my shirt?" " "Corrections," "Infinite Jest," "Absurdistan," "Extremely Successful and Incredibly Rich," the Eggers masterwork," he seethes, training his eyes on "all the clever, coy, convoluted, self-conscious, postmodern, post-post-ironic books The Times finds fit to love." If the first time is tragedy and the second time farce, "Pocket Kings" is, in spirit, the comical sequel to Frederick Exley's "Fan's Notes," the classic and psychologically tragic depiction of machismo mediocrity. Whereas Exley fixated on the alpha excellence of the football star Frank Gifford, redeeming himself in his dead jock father's eyes by writing the Great American Novel, Heller's Frank Dixon, failed writer of literary fiction, redeems himself through that second great American pastime, poker. In the name of his self-loathing, Dixon invokes an entire pantheon of male cultural heroes, from George Clooney to Tiger Woods to Michelangelo and Eddie Van Halen. Almost anyone successful who possesses a Y chromosome will do. The book being an ostensible poker memoir, Dixon also name-checks high-profile rounders like Doyle Brunson, Jesus Ferguson, Daniel Negreanu and Phil Ivey, but the real Frank Giffords of this story are the best-selling or critically acclaimed authors whose books rank higher on the Amazon charts than "America's 1,457th greatest living novelist." "If I ever see Dan Brown on an airplane," Dixon informs us, "I will follow him into the restroom and I'll barge in on him just when he's closing the door and yell, "Do you realize that you're not any good and that you're just lucky?" I will stalk Mitch Albom and lunge at him and when I've got him down on the sidewalk I'll say, "Hey, you know how you always write books about dying or dead people? Well, guess what? Your next book can be about yourself! "Cause as of now you're dead!" " Though Dixon is psychologically in a lineage that runs from Exley to the unapologetically misanthropic Sam Lipsyte, "Pocket Kings" is, stylistically, in much closer conversation with movies and TV shows like "Greenberg," "Young Adult" and "Curb Your Enthusiasm" that feature irascible and highly unlikable protagonists. Heller is facile with structure and plot, and his sentences and paragraphs are clear and often vivid (the mountains surrounding Las Vegas are as "dark and still as spilled syrup"; a stripper flops "around a pole like a dying trout"), but his truly standout talent - and I'm delivering this compliment with the front of my hand - is for comically depicting our most awkward and disgraceful inner states, mainly in the form of rants. "This was war!" he announces after stalking his agent while wolfing down boxes of Munchkins. I would become a raging pest, the Mother of All Nuisances, the Annoying Hyperactive Little Brother to everyone who had ever mistreated me. . . . I would be the Fly in the Lit World's Ointment, and my mug shot would be pinned to the walls in PEN offices around the world. . . . You rejected me? You snubbed me? Well, guess what. It's clobberin" time!" "Show me a writer who isn't paranoid," Dixon demands toward the end of his novmoir/memvel, "and I'll show you a deceased writer. Every year 200,000 new books come out, which means at least 199,999 other writers are hoping you fail. Critics lie in wait poised to tear you down. The odds are stacked against you. Against all odds, "Pocket Kings" will soon be joining "Everything Motherless Is Infinitely Heartbreaking and Corrected" on the tables at your local Barnes & Noble. This reviewer hopes and trusts - if only to secure her own safety - she has given Heller a usable pull-quote or two for the jacket. Katy Lederer is the author of the poetry collections "Winter Sex" and "The Heaven-Sent Leaf," as well as the family memoir "Poker Face: A Girlhood Among Gamblers."