The Royal Nonesuch

Starred review from October 30, 2006
The hipster cultural economy of the dot-com boom is skewered in this hilarious coming-of-age memoir. As a struggling 20-something novelist (Tuscaloosa
), Phillips headed to Los Angeles in the late 1990s, where he started two iconic ventures at the intersection of art, commerce and pretentiousness. The first was a "naming company" in which he made scads of money for brainstorming resonantly vacuous brand names for image-obsessed companies. The second was a content company that produced gonzo film and video pieces (signature opus: The Sound of One Hand Clapping
, starring Phillips as a Shaolin monk who defeats ninjas with his genitals) for Internet dissemination and, hopefully, cable pickup. Loosely orbiting South Park
auteurs Matt Stone and Trey Parker, the author embraces their aesthetic of scabrous, juvenile shock effect as a kind of anti-mainstream media insurgency—and then starts to question it after concocting a vile fake snuff film aimed at starting a Blair Witch
–style Web frenzy. Phillips embeds his off-kilter moral journey in an unsparing comic portrait of underground Hollywood, with its schizophrenic hustlers, desperate pitching, deluded financial projections, lascivious Sundance parties, bad indie films and more-alternative-than-thou poseurs who denounce corporate co-optation while angling to be co-opted. He surveys this freak show with a mordant, cutting wit that delivers insight and pathos along with the laughs.

December 1, 2006
Phillips grew up in privileged, permissive Marin County, as did, he notes, John Walker Lindh. But where Walker Lindh searched for meaning and direction among the ascetic fundamentalists of the Taliban, Phillips followed a much more American route, trying to find himself through adventures that included a bit part in a porno movie, a partnership in a "corporate brand strategy consultancy," and a leading role in an entertainment company called CRAPtv--none of them ventures for which he was particularly qualified. He'd wanted to be a writer before any of that, but had found himself unable to follow up his promising novel " Tuscaloosa" (1994) with anything but self-doubt. His time spent on the fringes of Next-Gen Hollywood (he shares an apartment with guys who fell out with " South Park" creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone) provides momentum and diversion but little else. Through brief success and persistent failure, Phillips struggles to reconcile himself with the notion that great potential and great expectations guarantee us exactly nothing. Funny, insightful, disturbing, and diverting--but not quite profound.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2006, American Library Association.)