In Barmack's glib, ironical debut, Joseph Braun, a lost, unemployed slacker, transforms himself into Jeb Brown, a more confident and less ethnic version of himself, in order to weasel his way onto a reality TV show. "The Camera loves honesty. The Camera seeks integrity," says one production assistant—and Jeb plans to deliver it. The show is called The Virgin
, and on it our purported hero must compete against various stock characters—Shep, the cowboy; Favre, the football player; Cody, the "man-child"—for the right to woo and deflower a 26-year-old virgin. The story hews closely to the slow winnowing down of the show's contestants as Madison, aka the Virgin, chooses among her various suitors as they take her on staged dates in semiexotic locales. Aiming past a too-easy satire of reality television, Barmack reaches to make the book a parable of a generation looking for an identity. No one here is what he seems to be. By the end, "Fat Jack... is no longer fat," teetotaling Greg the Christian is washing "greasy chicken bits down with beer," and, in the ultimate twist, the Virgin is something else entirely. Though the story moves quickly and the prose can be wryly comic, the book, like its main characters, is a bit confused as to what it wants to be. Agent, Byrd Leavell III. (Jan. 5)
