Arnon Grunberg's Phantom Pain, ignored when it was published in translation earlier this year, is something else. It's not light, but funny in a retch-in-the-gutter sort of way: It sours, like real literature. Many have recorded art's futile urgency, but rarely so blithely. There's hardly a mention of the actual business, a few macho aphorisms: "For the writer, life was a tainted mussel . . . already in your mouth, but you could spit it up just in time, before the food poisoning really kicked in."

This comes from the book-within-a-book The Empty Vessel and Other Pearls, the last heretofore unpublished work of the high-living, increasingly broke and uninspired Robert G. Mehlman--author of a standout debut (268th in the World, out of print) about his father's ill-fated tennis career (a bad call prompted him to chomp an opponent's calf at Wimbledon, resulting in a lifelong ban), the Sydney Brochstein cycle (out of print), and other works (out of print). His son, Harpo Saul ("my parents had discussed the advantages of having an abortion"), gives the intro and conclusion, providing a mini-bio of a man who sacrificed everything not for the book, but to the book.

E.g., after another of Mehlman's psychiatrist wife's patients kills himself, a parental fight ensues and Harpo writes a letter to God. Mehlman finds the letter and publishes a "reply" along with other doting Letters to Harpo. Empty Vessel, if merely a chronicling of his actual life (how he met his wife at an all-night deli, whiffs of "existential loneliness," his affair with the titular "Empty Vessel"), betrays a writer who's garrulous, undaunted, but clearly unsure of his craft ("Chimneysweeps don't foreshadow anything, do they?"). His memory is "in his balls," and so's his writing, and Grunberg brings the two together when an impotent Mehlman attempts to masturbate in the bathroom at a performance of Wozzeck, his "weenie . . . getting smaller and bloodier." But, he thinks, "the blood on my hands made me truly masculine."

Throughout, Grunberg seems willing to use the page, to profane it in such a way that the whole ostensible profundity of the thing, the novel or whatever, is blown apart--mentions of hangnails, addenda, maxims that only skirt cliche because really self-truths are always rote. As for Mehlman, he never writes his opus, instead producing the "literary cookbook" Polish-Jewish Cuisine in 69 Recipes, "genius" according to critics, and now in its 34th edition.