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There should be more writers like Augusten Burroughs. Or, to strike a less didactic note: there aren't enough writers like Augusten Burroughs. He's not a dazzling prose stylist; he's not an earthshattering thinker; he's not bubbling over with vast literary ambition; and he's not out to teach us a lesson. But he does what he does very well - and that is write spare, funny, sharp, well-constructed satires on modern America.
His preferred medium has been the memoir, and in three autobiographical collections he's coolly dissected the phobias, eccentricities and prejudices of his own life. Sellevision (Atlantic, £7.99), his first novel, published in America in 2000 and now available in Britain, finds him in a less solipsistic mood. It's a fantasia on the lives of a group of shopping channel hosts, which effortlessly expands into a
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| Augusten Burroughs’s first foray into fiction is a deliciously puerile satire, finds tim
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bitter-sweet mockery of American self-importance.
The homely idyll his characters peddle to a gullible public is undercut by the hypocritical corruptions of their own lives. Burroughs proves himself a master of the gross-out, with a puerile sense of humour worthy of American Pie (the trigger for the story is the downfall of a gay, daytime shopping channel host who loses his job because his penis falls out of his dressing gown during a "Slumber Sunday Sundown Toys for Tots" phone-in broadcast). But he's also a master of scene construction, with an eye for a well-timed, extra-dry payoff, and, despite a cast of stock characters, he wrings some pathos from our fragile humanity.
Armistead Maupin he's not; but with practice he might get close. 
FIRST
POSTED JANUARY 30
 Last week: Sixty Lights
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