Stardog

Driscoll's ironic but meandering follow-up to his well-received first novel, Lucky Man, Lucky Woman, charts the exploits of Earl Patrick Godfrey, an antihero so self-destructive that he makes Nicholas Cage's character in Leaving Las Vegas look like a paragon of sober-minded restraint and stability. Earl could be the poster boy for Underachievers Anonymous: an ex-college athlete with a near-genius-level I.Q., he's done everything in his power to booze his way into a state of perpetual oblivion (""Nothing there,"" he reflects in a typically self-deprecating aside, ""but a once potentially brilliant mind decomposing to leaf mold""). Waking up one Michigan morning, suffused by a crushing sense of purposelessness, Earl decides to ""borrow"" the sports car that his ex-wife took from him in their divorce settlement and light out for parts unknown. Along the way, he gets involved with the seductive Miranda Mountain, a card-dealing, drug-running high school dropout who's supposed to be provocatively enigmatic, but who seldom registers as anything more than an improbably articulate cipher. Their aimless cross-country peregrinations finally come to a head when they become the targets of an outsized thug named JoMo. Suddenly, what has heretofore been a bitter, desultory examination of contemporary alienation and self-loathing degenerates into a pseudo-noirish farce, replete with such snarled dialogue as ""stay loose, increase your shelf life"" and ""You hold or you fold. It's your choice."" Driscoll does have talent: when he uses various imagined voices, like those of Earl's shrink and his one-time detox doctor, to underscore the minute shifts in Earl's psyche, he pulls it off with grace and delicacy. Unfortunately, artificial-sounding dialogue, a general lack of narrative tension and poorly defined supporting characters relegate this novel to the realm of underachieving sophomore efforts. (May)