The Royal Nonesuch starts off tellingly, with a motorcycle crash. With a novel already published and praise already bestowed, Glasgow Phillips was living the great American writer's dream. He was riding high and wild on a KZ 750 bike and a Stanford Creative Writing stipend when an errant Toyota Camry knocked him back to earth. Phillips, rattled but structurally intact, picked himself up and moved from Austin to Los Angeles.

His second novel remained unwritten, but it was the late '90s, an iridescent and utopian dawn — at least in California, where everyone knew what the next big thing was and the smart ones tried to buy, hustle, and steal a part of it. As the reader soon learns, Glasgow Phillips is a born hustler.

"The Royal Nonesuch," as Mark Twain wrote it in Huckleberry Finn , is a hoax: it's a theater show full of razzmatazz and flim-flammery that promises the "greatest tragedy of all time." Of course, when the curtain rises, nothing's doing, but — and here lies the genius — the audience, not wanting to admit to being stooges, tells the other townsfolk how great the show was. This pretty much nails Glasgow Phillips' trajectory. With his friends Jason and Dian, and a merry band of fools, Phillips starts numerous ventures, hoping to harness the exuberant economy and almost end-of-days exuberance. He starts Quiddity, a corporate-naming company; CRAPtv, an online TV content provider; and a Blair Witch Project homage. Needless to say, despite promise and munificence from a large number of people, Philips is slowly but surely repeating his crash in slow motion.

The book is a rambling Vanity Fair of late '90s Los Angeles. Matt Stone and Trey Parker make appearances, and Les Claypool and Ted Demme have cameos. Sex parties and the ins-and-outs of venture capitalism collide in a way only possible at that time and in that place. Phillips' tale faithfully details the insanity of the bubble and the humanity of the little stories that, like bubbles in a flute of champagne, fizzle and pop.

-Joshua David Stein