Lady With a Laptop

Simon Hopkins is a second-rate novelist who's managed to swing a summer gig in Greece, leading a writing workshop at a holistic holiday camp for grown-ups. Aside from fiction writing as therapy, the center offers colonic massages, gastric dancing, early-morning affirmation sessions, and consciousness-raising via orgasms. This means that D.M. Thomas gets to poke fun at veganism, meditation, and other New Age-isms, as well as to twist a knife into real-life literary colleagues: Mystery writer Ruth Rendell is teaching on the next island over; Tim O'Brien led the previous fiction workshop. Thomas' alter ego, Hopkins, in a glorious nod to Harriet the Spy, jots down pithy sketches of his students and then carelessly leaves his notebook out. The outcome of that incident is only to be expected, which you cannot say for Lady With a Laptop. Part farce, part murder mystery, part biting indictment of literary pretensions, Laptop is ultimately too much of a mishmash to truly satisfy. C+