THE EGG CODE

Heppner's bumptiously clever debut novel revolves around a vague premise: the Internet has been taken over, or even formed, by one business: the Gloria Corporation. In an oblique way, Gloria affects the interwoven fortunes of an odd set of characters who live close to each other in Big Dipper Township. Lydia Tree, an outrageously aggressive woman trying to hustle her intellectually underachieving son, Simon, into a stage and screen career, is the daughter of Kay Tree, a cryptanalyst who tracked Gloria for the Defense Department. Steve Mould, Lydia's husband, is not up-and-coming enough for his wife, until he gets Simon a spot on the advertisements for the chain that owns the furniture store he manages. These lewdly suggestive advertisements are merely a ploy by their creator, Gray Hollows, to provoke his boss into firing him. Gray's friend, Olden Field, meanwhile, is producing a factoid site, Eggcode.com, in order to flood the Web with disinformation. Lydia, in a typically manic moment, has entrusted Olden with pictures of Simon for a bogus Net-driven celebrity campaign, and Olden misuses them for his site. Eggcode's pics of Simon eventually backfire on Gray's ad campaign, resulting in a concatenation of disasters: Gray's ardently longed-for firing, Steve's dismissal from his company, Lydia and Steve's divorce and Olden's arrest. Meanwhile, Lydia's friend, Donna Skye, the daughter of an old German code man who knows all about Gloria, is undergoing a shaky divorce from her husband, Derek, America's premier motivational speaker, who was sponsored by Gloria until he lost his faith. Heppner resembles the movie director Paul Thomas Anderson more than he resembles any fellow writer—like Anderson's Magnolia, this novel operates on multiple levels, alternating among an evidently empathetic intelligence, an uncommon comic brio and outrageously sophomoric symbolism. (June)

Forecast:The novel's high hipness quotient should attract a crowd comfortable with irony and David Foster Wallace–style narrative exhibitionism.