In the demimonde of petty scams

When absurdity outstrips satire

There’s a truism that the absurdities of our culture continually outstrip satire.

While that observation is itself decades old, it’s surely getting more apt daily. You might even say that reality saves us the trouble of satire by satirizing itself.

But where does that leave writers who aspire to pillory society’s flaws by employing exaggeration and clear-eyed mockery?

Ben Gwin is a Pittsburgh-based author whose debut novel, “Clean Time: The True Story of Ronald Reagan Middleton,” has a pill-popping, coke-snorting protagonist who goes from jail to the cast of a realityshow set in a rehab facility. Ronald is a 25-year-old rich kid from New Jersey gone wrong; the program, called “Clean Time,” lets viewers vote addicts off the air, and it makes him a national celebrity. In the story’s background lurks the Werewolf Killer, a serial murderer who targets addicts. And the book’s latter half is one long fitful chase, with Ronald and various companions fleeing cops, reporters and the TVprogram’s producers.

Complicating things further, though the book is ostensibly Ronald’s memoir, we learn that it’s in fact a manuscript carefully assembled by a pretentious academic named Harold Swanger, who — working with Ronald’s own resentful younger brother — offers running commentary and incorporates “found documents” such as business contracts and scripts for the “Clean Time” show.

This is all pleasingly meta, with the added diversion that we don’t know which narrator to trust less. Ronald seems truthful and self-deprecating enough — but could he merely be following the lead of his on-air persona, seeking sympathy and attention like debunked reallife addiction-memoirist James Frey, of “A Million Little Pieces” infamy? Swanger, meanwhile, has his own agenda, which might include gilding Ronald’s story to confirm his hypothesis that it’s a morally instructivepostmodern “Odyssey.”

Mr. Gwin is an engaging writer, and on one level, “Clean Time” is a vivid portrait of life in the druggy demimonde of petty scams, aimless loafing erupting in sudden violence, and epic pharmaceutical hangovers. As Ronald tells us at one point, “When the coke ran out, my head felt like an aquarium filled withgasoline and predatory fish.”

And there are some good satiric riffs here, starting with the antihero’s given name, summoning a figure of cheerfully vacuous celebrity and “just say no” self-righteousness (everyone calls him “Ronald Reagan,” never just “Ronald”). That “Clean Time” airs on something called The Recovery Channel is a nice touch. And there’s some cutting critique, as when Ronald observes, of his own TV persona, “Anyone who appealed to that many Americans couldn’t be very cool.”

Ultimately, though, “Clean Time” feels less like an all-out satire than it does like an anti-heroic coming-of-age novel with satiric elements threaded throughout.

Thisis partly because the world already has long harbored omniscient “reality” TV (such as CBS’s “Big Brother”) and recovery TV (such as A&E’s “Intervention”) — media that virtually satirizes itself. Mostly, however, the issue is that Mr. Gwin works so hard to make Ronald sympathetic that we can’t get the distancefrom him that satire demands.

We see his flaws and grasp that he’s caught in a mad system. But there’s a bit too much pathos, as when Ronald observes of life with his junk-collecting drug-dealer girlfriend, “Our house continued to fill up with other people’s memories. But I didn’t mind. They were better than most of my own.” Earnestness is the enemy of satire. And Mr. Gwin’s able lyricism — in lines like “We left tracks in the dew on the greens and lay next to each other on the cusp of a sand trap, watching the stars” — put you in Ronald’s damp shoes, not a place from which to view the bigger picture satire requires.

Still, taken as it is, “Clean Time” is a satisfying journey.