I LIKE BEING KILLED

Not as compulsively clever as his last novel (The Collector Collector, 1997), these seven stories wear their millennial cynicism heavily. Fischer seems to have substituted world-weariness and sarcasm for wit and wordplay.

All of Fischer’s unhappy protagonists are either failures or hopeless wannabes on the verge of giving up: in the novella-length “We Ate the Chef,” a burnt-out Webhead takes a last-ditch holiday he can’t afford with people he doesn’t much like (including, by surprise, a successful competitor), and discovers the depth of his disconnect. The failed software designer, like the story itself, peters out in bed with a sexy young Russian girl who doesn’t excite the jaded entrepreneur. In the equally long title piece, a female standup comic, who professes to “live for cock,” finds little consolation even in sex as her career nose-dives: she climbs Nelson’s Column naked to little notice, and a benefit for two jailed Burmese comics draws a tiny audience. Her sense of evil in the world is matched only by the journalist in “Ice Tonight in the Hearts of Young Visitors,” who witnesses genuine horror and chaos during the fall of Ceausescu in Romania. The nastiest of Fischer’s bilious characters is a solicitor’s rep (and aspiring actor) who mocks his dim, lowlife clients, and loathes his racially mixed Brixton neighborhood. A would-be gunslinger in “Fifty Uselessnesses” can’t hold a job, and no longer gets bookings for his cowboy routine, so he stage-manages his own death-by-shootout. Two more comic pieces—one about a desperate artist who’ll do anything to get attention, the other about a fellow who gets himself locked in bookstores at night—rely on one-joke ideas that never develop.

The cheeky titles that seldom mean much are typical of Fischer’s attempt to dazzle: the writing here is darker than in his earlier work, and never rises above its easily earned despair.