"After the Workshop"

I have trouble resisting novels about writers' lives. "After the Workshop"(Counterpoint, 2010), by John McNally, goes one better: The novelist writes about a novelist who is writing about a novelist. Very "meta." The main novel's main character, Jack Hercules Sheahan, is - like John McNally, and like Sheahan's protagonist - a graduate of the famous Iowa Writers' Workshop. Twelve years later, he still lives in Iowa City, hasn't published anything since his big success - a story in The New Yorker - and now earns his living as a media escort for more famous writers visiting Iowa City on book tours. The book is satirical, funny, and sad. The workshop, writers, and aspiring writers are all skewered. Yet the tone of the novel is, on another level, affectionate as well, and the main character is oddly good-natured despite all his disappointments and the embarrassing things that happen to him. The world of writers and writing still seems the highest calling to McNally and to Sheahan both.