In this comic novel, a jaded adman gets a chance for redemption when God taps him for his marketing campaign.

Dinsmore “Dinny” Rein is 55, divorced and demoted, since he’s been freezing up in meetings at his Chicago ad agency. At the company, run by the loathsome Steve Sinkle and sexy creative director Ester, Dinny is derisively referred to as “Noodles” because one of his two remaining clients is a pasta company. Exhausted and irritated, Dinny agrees to meet the baritone who keeps calling him on his cellphone. The old man says he’s God; to get people back to church, he wants Dinny to do an ad campaign. Dinny is skeptical at first, but he then learns that $10 million has shown up in the agency’s bank account. The next morning, Dinny wakes up to find he looks 35 again, “jelly-donut belly” and wrinkles gone. Emboldened, he strides into the office and gets Sinkle to give him the resources he needs. He produces an evocative, successful image campaign; meanwhile, girlfriend Patti gets a similarly miraculous youthful makeover, too. Yet Dinny is dogged by problems, as Sinkle and Ester work behind his back to do an alternate campaign. Worse still, God proves to be less than all-powerful, with a slippery hold on the human forms he inhabits, and his campaign monies are provided through questionable means. By novel’s end, Dinny emerges as more successful, yet a bit bemused, especially because he receives a call for help from another religious figure. Former adman Vanderwarker—perhaps best known for Writing with the Master (2014), about John Grisham helping him with one of his other novels—brings plenty of insider perspective to this snarky, rollicking tale. Just when the deus ex machina seems shaky, that becomes precisely the point, and the novel turns into a rather biting social commentary. The character study of Dinny disappears somewhat in that transition, although perhaps that’s also intentional given he’s merely a Job stuck doing a job for God.

An amusing satire about the ad business, with clever twists on its gimmick and dead-on barbs about our brand-obsessed culture.

An aspiring author discovers that writing a novel is hard work, even harder when his taskmaster mentor is his friend John Grisham.

Even with the best-selling Grisham’s encouragement, advice and painstaking edits, Vanderwarker couldn’t sell his novel. A former adman who moved to Virginia around the same time as Grisham and who shared with the novelist environmental activism and a love of sports, Vanderwarker had long wanted to channel his creativity into a book, though a bunch of unpublished manuscripts were the only results. At lunch one day, he received a surprising offer from his friend Grisham: “Look, I’d be willing to help you if you’d like. Kind of mentor you through the novel-writing process. Something I’ve never done before—not that plenty of people haven’t asked.” Grisham would later remark of the manuscript that the “dialogue doesn’t sound real.” Neither does it here, as Vanderwarker purports to remember paragraphs of conversation from a time that he wouldn’t have been taking notes. He ultimately found his mentor criticizing his characters, plotting, organization and pretty much everything else about a novel that is presented here in chunks of various drafts, with Grisham’s notes, and then revisions, with notes. “What happened to the vision of novel writing as a glorious act of creation with rays of light streaming down from on high and a string section playing in accompaniment?” he wonders. “It’s been replaced by the mundane piecework of tedious and time-consuming revision.” If nothing else, the book convinces readers that the prolific Grisham works methodically on his fiction, as the author’s experience confirms that it isn’t as easy to write a best-seller as some might think.

Not only did the collaboration result in this, the author’s first published book, but the same publisher has agreed to issue the novel that had been rejected, for which this how-to guide serves as an extended promotion.