Hilarious 'Shining City' sparkles with nonstop fun

Marcus Ripps, the protagonist of Seth Greenland's smart, hilarious second novel, is a decent guy spinning the wheels of his life. He's production manager of Wazoo Toys in North Hollywood, a very small part of the very large and ever growing empire presided over by his friend Roon Primus, though friend isn't exactly the word one hastens to attach to someone as rapacious and sublimely vulgar as Roon Primus. While Roon is on the fast track to unimaginable riches, Marcus is going nowhere.

Then two startling things happen: Roon announces that he's shutting down Wazoo Toys in the United States and moving the entire operation to China, and Marcus' brother, Julian, a sleazeball, drops dead at age 40, bequeathing to his astonished brother his small business, Shining City Dry Cleaner. On Marcus' first visit to this enterprise a visitor walks in and asks "'Who are you?' in a European accent whose exact geographical origins he couldn't place but sensed was an area of whimsical castles, bad food, and a tortured relationship with Russia."

His visitor, a striking woman of about 30, then asks, "Where is Juice?" This, it seems, was Julian's nickname when he conducted whatever business it was he conducted from the office behind the dry-cleaner's facade. She identifies herself as Amstel, hands him an envelope with $1,800 inside, and, when he presses her for more information, guesses that Juice had about 20 people working for him: all women. Marcus enjoys talking to her but is thrown for a loop when she says: "Dates, Marcus. I have SUV to pay off."

At last, the light goes on. Marcus thought Julian's lawyer had described his late brother as a "pip," but in fact he was a pimp, running prostitutes and using the dry-cleaning business as a front. Now Marcus is truly stunned. He'd lost his job at Wazoo as soon as he'd told Roon he wouldn't move to China; the boutique clothing shop co-owned by his wife, Jan, is losing money; his indebtedness is out of control; his son, Nathan, goes to an expensive private school; his mother-in-law, Lenore, who lives with them, has various medical needs and wants to purchase pole-dancing equipment. Et cetera.

So Marcus decides that he will be "an enlightened potentate, running the business according to the highest standards of American management practice, not like Roon, who ran Wazoo like a pimp." He vows that "there would be no sampling of the goods, no fraternizing with the work force, no office romance." He calls a meeting, at which a dozen women show up, and introduces himself as "Breeze," his chosen nom de guerre. He tells them he'll set up 401(k) accounts for those who want them and will provide liberal benefits. Soon he is "stunned to find that" the business is grossing about $25,000 a week, with his cut roughly $4,500 a week, tax-free.

By this point we're halfway through "Shining City," but the laughs - and I can't remember when a novel last made me laugh so often or so loudly - have only just begun. At first Marcus tries to keep Jan ignorant of the truth, but then a crisis arises and she's drawn (eagerly) into the Web. Lenore follows suit, leaving only 11-year-old Nathan in the dark. Greenland, who lives in Los Angeles, drops zingers left and right. There's the nouveau riche society woman, for example, playing Lady Bountiful: "She was a lioness and, as such, not the kind of woman to whom Jan ordinarily gravitated. But she was friendly and treated Jan as if they might be members of the same club, one that used linen tablecloths, high-quality silver, and social assassination as a means of protocol enforcement." Or the woman whom Marcus hires to plan Nathan's bar mitzvah: "Hipster-nerd eyewear raked across an oval face that was distinguished by a gold nose ring in her left nostril. Her hair appeared to have been cut with a garden tool and was streaked with a shade of green that belonged on a tropical fish. She was a party planner, someone to whom people turned when the fear of faux pas had loosened their billfolds."

That is very smart stuff, and there's plenty more of it here. But there's serious stuff as well. Greenland understands that the exhilarating yet troubling place where Marcus finds himself entails complex and often ambiguous questions of right and wrong, and he treats these questions sensitively and intelligently. Mainly, though, "Shining City" is simply pedal-to-the-metal fun - sassy and knowing and irreverent.