Keith Blanchard goes high-brow.

Last Summer, Maxim editor-in-chief Keith Blanchard addressed the Columbia School of Journalism with a talk entitled "How Maxim Saved Journalism." The bizarre speech, which, sadly, was not followed up by a sequel called "How Maxim Saved Christmas," defended the famous lad mag from accusations of anti-intellectualism. Taking a cue from Elvis, Blanchard asked: Can 11 million Maxim fans be wrong?

The real surprise is how much Blanchard-a Princeton grad, former Marie Claire editor and TV Guide contributor-seems to believe his own p.r.; namely, the myth that Maxim is a bold strike against political correctness, or anything other than a platform for making guys think that certain products will make their cocks bigger. As if to further his case, Maxim's Blanchard has now engaged himself in that most intellectual of pursuits, novel writing.

The Deed revolves around Jason Hansvoort, a dashing young advertising executive. He meets a beautiful Native American girl named Amanda, who tells him that due to a forgotten business deal that an ancestor conducted on behalf of a bunch of Injuns, Jason may own the deed to all of Manhattan-if only he can find the long lost piece of paper.

Over the course of the plodding story, Hansvoort gets a new boss cut out from a Maxim reader's worst nightmare: a corporate team player who wants results, expects employees to come in to work on time and is-gasp!-a woman. Jason promptly quits his job, of course, telling his boss that she should be a secretary. Score one for the Y chromosome, dude.

The characters in The Deed are your basic McInerny/Easton Ellis trash, dumbed way down and updated for the '03: more corporate casual, less coke. Throughout, Blanchard never even winks in the direction of satire. He fully expects readers to like these assholes, to sympathize with them, to actually feel their pain. You know when you're at a bar and there are four dudes in their late twenties wearing matching gray suits complaining about their jobs and singing along to the Stone Temple Pilots song they just put on the jukebox? Now imagine them saying things like, "Now rape, there's something I could sink my teeth into. It would be just as intense [as murder]-plus you get laid."

The day traders and admen populating The Deed embody the idealized image of the Maxim demographic: the affluent, young businessman who totally doesn't work in a cubicle or live with his parents. Although Blanchard only name-drops Maxim once, its ethos infuses every page of his horrible little book. At one point, the author restates his magazine's mission statement, word for word.

Blanchard's characters live in a self-satisfied, testosterone-drenched world where sports, business, new electronic gizmos, raunchy jokes, corporate gossip and tales of improbable sexual conquest combine in unthinkably complex combinations. And the combinations are indeed unthinkably complex. One month, the gadgets are on page sixteen, and the sex is on page fourteen. The next month, their positions are flipped.

Without pictures of Tara Reid in a bikini, witless captions and articles with double-digit word counts, Blanchard is out of his depth. Throughout, the style is stilted, the diction awkward. It is the literary equivalent of a Maxim reader attempting to talk to a real girl. It is also clear by page ten that the author prefers to work without the aid of a dictionary. His editors at Simon & Schuster apparently figured his Maxim fans wouldn't notice.

In his limp attempts at an elevated comic tone, Blanchard comes off like a frat boy trying to re-write A Confederacy of Dunces. Reading The Deed, I couldn't help think that John Kennedy Toole offed himself when he couldn't get that masterwork published, yet this grinning, graceless hack has a piece of shit piled high in Barnes & Noble only because he's the editor-in-chief of Maxim, the magazine that helps kill journalism every fucking month. Here's hoping it can't kill literature, too.