(Spiegel & Grau; 259 pages; $15 paperback) Reviewed by John McNally San Francisco Chronicle, Copyright 2010 In his latest novel, 'The Thieves of Manhattan,' Adam Langer serves the literary world its own head on a platter, most notably the phonies and the fakers. Our narrator of this timely satire is all-around sad sack Ian Minot, a writer of short stories whose subjects are too small to appeal to anyone -- not to book publishers, magazine editors, or reading-series hosts. Ian has been in New York for five years, surviving on a 'small inheritance' and his salary as a barista, clinging to his dreams of becoming a writer. But by the time we meet him, he's a bitter failure. It doesn't help that his Romanian girlfriend, the beautiful Anya Petrescu, is about to leave him while on the brink of landing her own book contract, or that faux gangbanger Blade Markham, author of the more-than-likely-fake memoir 'Blade by Blade,' keeps appearing in Ian's life, or that he is surrounded at work by other loser-artists, most notably Faye Curry, who hosts ill-attended showings of her paintings at galleries. It's not until Ian's path crosses former editor Jed Roth's that his life holds any promise. Jed, also a failed writer, has a master plan that will make both men a fortune while also proving what fools New York agents and editors are. There's one hitch: Ian has to become a phony himself. 'The Thieves of Manhattan' is a confidence game novel, in which nearly everyone is working a grift. It's a light and fast read, with short chapters and plot twists every couple of pages. Nothing is at it seems. Langer clearly has fun sending up fake memoirists (take that, James Frey!) as well as agents and editors too success-driven to question a memoir's validity, while hammering home his themes of, as one character puts it, 'truth and trust and inviolable covenants between authors and readers.' This is a novel that insiders -- those familiar with Publishers Marketplace and Bookscan -- will probably gobble up. The novel is a Who's Who of the publishing world. In the space of two pages alone, we find Malcolm Gladwell, Gary Shteyngart, Eric Simonoff, Bill Clegg, Christy Fletcher, Joe Regal, Sonny Mehta, Nan Talese, Scott Rudin, Ron Bass, Chip McGrath, and Terry Gross -- all real people, all insiders. There's a fine line when it comes to name-dropping: You want to wink at the reader who knows this world, but you don't want to alienate the reader who doesn't. Is it too much here? Perhaps. The novel sometimes sags under the weight of its own cleverness, including Langer's glossary of made-up nouns and verbs based mostly on real-life literary people. Manuscripts are 'lished'; people have luxuriant 'chabons' or frizzy 'atwoods' of hair; they smoke 'vonneguts.' There are more than 40 such words in the glossary, all used pervasively. Also overdone is Langer's penchant for phonetically spelling dialect. Says Anya at one point, 'Ve should heff met earlier, Ee-yen, vhen ve both vere different pipples.' Ian observes of another novel, 'Though the plot remained amusing, the characters were too broad and lacking in substance,' and that's pretty much how I felt about 'The Thieves of Manhattan.' I wanted to care for Ian Minot the way I cared for the narrators of Richard Russo's 'Straight Man' or Edward Allen's 'Mustang Sally,' two satires I love, but I didn't. One thing's for sure: Langer knows this world inside and out. He's the former editor of Book Magazine and, as a novelist, has been the recipient of more than one 'good deal,' according to Publishers Marketplace. His own narrator, if he were reading Langer's novel, might wonder if 'The Thieves of Manhattan' is an honest-to-goodness satire holding up the publishing world for legitimate inspection or if it's actually an insider's attempt to name-drop excessively and exploit every hot-button issue to generate buzz. This very question -- what's honest and what's not -- is what this entire novel is about, after all. When I saw that 'The Thieves of Manhattan' was blurbed by Laura Albert (a.k.a. JT LeRoy, perhaps the fakest of the fake memoirists), it definitely raised red flags. I don't necessarily blame Adam Langer for a blurb, but isn't it too cynical for a satire purportedly about 'truth and trust and inviolable covenants between authors and readers' to come with an endorsement from one of the industry's worst offenders? You have to draw a moral line somewhere or risk the novel becoming an ouroboros, the serpent that swallows its own tail. To paraphrase a famous scene from Spider-Man: With satire comes great responsibility. John McNally's most recent novel is 'After the Workshop.' 