Click the book cover above to order "As a Friend" by Forrest Gander at amazon.com

You have a friend who's golden. People flock to him just so they can tell everyone they spent a few precious seconds in his presence. They repeat his words as witticisms, even though he spouts mere common clichés from his lips. Even those who don't know him, pretend that they do.

Everybody loves him. You want to be him.

And you hate him.

In the new novel "As a Friend" by Forrest Gander, a man's charmed life turns out to be not-so-charmed. But nobody notices until it's too late.

Les is full of lies. He tells everyone that he has a wife "up on a farm" in Missouri. He claims with a wink that he convinced her to stay there because it's a better place for her to paint the pictures that she sells. Les visits her three times a month on weekends, and during the week, he lives with a so-called lesbian named Sarah who probably is in love with him.

Clay knows all this because he works at the survey company with Les. After work, Les, Clay, Quentin, and maybe the part-timers go to The High Hat for a few drinks when the weather gets hot, more for the air conditioning than for the beer. Everybody there talks to Les. He quotes poetry in the middle of conversation and speaks in fake accents, and Clay hates it.

He hates that Sarah and Les sometimes invite him to spend time with them, and then they ignore him. He detests it when Les gets away with things at work: calling in sick when he really isn't; getting Clay in trouble by avoiding hard jobs; making small tasks difficult by pulling pranks that Quentin brushes away. All in all, Clay really hates Les.

And he's is sure he's in love with Les. Clay also practices Les's little mannerisms. He wants Les dead so he can become Les.

But how do you take down a legend? How can you argue with a roomful of people who reach out to someone as if he's a Messiah? How can you hurt a man who appears to be immune to pain?

The answer: with a $50 bribe and a quarter coin.

The word "Huh?" comes to mind a lot when reading this book. More fictional essay (at under 110 pages) than novel, the first half of this book had me on the edge of my seat. It's the story of a birth, and Clay's version of Les's life. If author Forrest Gander had stopped there, I'd be raving about "As a Friend."

But such a great beginning morphs into near-incoherency all too quickly. Unfortunately, the latter half of this book consists of half-sentence thoughts from Sarah, and random paragraphs that only punctuate the confusion you'll have by then.

If you possess the ability to put a book away in the middle of it, then read the first half of this one. If you, like me, are compelled to finish your novels, then "As a Friend," I can't recommend this one.

The Bookworm is Terri Schlichenmeyer. Terri has been reading since she was 3 years old and she never goes anywhere without a book. She lives on a hill in Wisconsin with two dogs and 11,000 books.