"A&R," for those out of the music-industry loop, stands for "artists and repertoire." An A&R man is the record-label flack sent from club to club and demo to demo in search of the next big thing, an act to drive up perpetually flagging sales and send all the executives home happy and well-paid. Needless to say, A&R work has about as much to do with music as accounting, so it's a mystery why veteran music writer Bill Flanagan chose the sleaziest, least interesting side of the industry as the subject of his first novel. As the former editor of Musician magazine and the author of such great rock books as U2 At The End Of The World, Flanagan has a talent for taking superstars and making them seem human—that is to say, making the unreal real again. A&R finds Flanagan lacking where the opposite is called for, as his moneyed characters never quite resonate with verisimilitude. That's especially disappointing considering what Flanagan has seen during his days as a journalist through his current stint as senior VP at VH1. Flanagan could write a searing tell-all, but instead he's written a mildly satiric tell-some with a shockingly facile grasp of irony. Will the hot neo-punk buzz band make it big, or will the underdog black lesbian bohemian group surprise everyone with sudden success? Will the Jewel-esque ingenue actually possess a strong grasp of the business and all its back-stabbing tools? Will the major-label shakeup—modeled loosely, it seems, on the plight of former Arista head Clive Davis, with a touch of Island's Chris Blackwell thrown in for effect—ultimately backfire on the characters behind the coup? No industry cliché is left untouched, while no new facet of the music business is exposed. Drugs, secretive dealings, and covert boondoggles to far-off places: Like a good journalist, Flanagan knows how to fill space, but he neglects to give his characters life beyond their stereotypes. He should be above such fluff-piece tactics, but with so many potential bridges to burn, he appears to have chosen the easy path. The average reader may have trouble mustering more than a prolonged yawn.