£6.99

Frédéric Beigbeder
(Picador) $19.95 PB

What an interesting idea, naming a novel by its price. The book is to be identified purely by its monetary exchange value, and we are to understand that everything has been reduced to cash, credit or cheque. Pity the idea doesn't really work here in Australia, where the book costs not £6.99, but $19.95. It is even more of a pity that the book is completely crap - not ironically crap, or vacuous in some fascinatingly postmodern way - just crap.

For one thing, it's a fairly blatant rip-off of American Psycho: a highly-paid, totally cynical young executive, also a cocaine addict, itemises lists of his designer-label clothing and the latest electronic gadgets while describing his hedonistic sexual adventures and occasional acts of extreme violence. Except American Psycho was shocking, deeply disturbing and somehow hilarious, while £6.99 is lame, boring, and just deeply annoying in its pathetic attempts at dry wit. I hope 'Frédéric Beigbeder' is not the author's real name: it would be really sad to have attached your real name to something as completely pitiful as this book. The reason it really gets to me, more than all the other crap books which are published every month, month after month, is that £6.99 presents itself as a clever, hip statement of some sort, when in fact it is a half-baked work of soft porn. It's like a novelistic equivalent of Vice magazine.

Not only is the text crap, the copyediting and typesetting were also faulty - which is fair enough for small-time local productions, but just demonstrates the publisher's complete indifference to quality or substance where the book is a big-budget international release. The translation from French is also severely incompetent. The original French novel was set in Paris, but the publishers - God knows why - decided to set the English version in London. However, the translator often forgets this, with the protagonist, supposedly a London ad-man, occasionally letting slip comments such as 'my English was not so good'.

£6.99 succeeds resoundingly in its aims: it is the most cyncically-produced novel I have ever encountered. Paying $19.95 to read it would be like including the McDonalds corporation in your will.

Review by John Mansfield