Common advice is to write what you know, which means that a fair parody of serious literature as a genre is a story about an aging male author with some kind of driftless personal life being prompted to go on a transformative adventure, usually in the erotic company of a younger woman. Taken as a member of that genre, The Paper Men is an awful novel. Taken as a parody, it rises to occasional flashes of brilliance.

Wilfred Barclay is a certified titan of English literature, coasting on the reputation of his first novel, and also a miserable and curmudgeonly alcoholic. He crosses paths with the ambitious American academic Richard Tucker, who seeks to become the authorized biographer of Wilf Barclay. And over the course of several years, the two men grind each other to pieces.

Barclay's disdain and hatred of Tucker is the animating spirit of this book, a vile gut level enmity that propels him across Europe in an alcoholic fugue. Barclay's misogyny is also a major character trait, he doesn't much care for his ex-wife, daughter, or any of the other women he encounters, except his lust for Tucker's younger wife, but compared to how he treats Tucker himself, the misogyny is small change.

Three scenes illuminate the book: The opening, where Barclay mistakes Tucker for a badger rummaging in his trash bin and shoots him with an air gun, an extended encounter at a Swiss mountain lodge where Tucker attempts to bargain his wife's body for Barclay's assent, and then saves Barclay's life in a mountaineering accident, and the conclusion, which is worth not spoiling. A fantastically savage and ironic spirit of farce animates these scenes.

Unfortunately, they're connected by about 150 pages of nothing much in particular, a venting of bile and delirium tremens that is neither entertaining not informative.