Even for a book about a wired, sleep-deprived paramedic rushing from one harrowing emergency to another in New York's Hell's Kitchen, acting as the final gatekeeper between life and death, Joe Connelly's Bringing Out The Dead has a fevered prose style that mistakes intensity for poetry and discards structure for unalloyed stream-of-consciousness. The underrated film adaptation, by longtime writing-and-directing team Paul Schrader and Martin Scorsese, gives shape to Connelly's story without sacrificing its barreling momentum or its potent episodes of surreal humor. Connelly, who worked a city ambulance for nearly a decade, served as a technical consultant on the film, and his experience bleeds into his second novel, Crumbtown, a half-cracked portrait of a man who advises a reality-TV show about his own life. But without the shred of verisimilitude that grounded Bringing Out The Dead, to say nothing of Schrader and Scorsese's services, Connelly's absurdist black comedy drifts into chaos, piling on so many layers of cartoonish artifice that it becomes hard to figure out what world he's trying to reference. This time, he actually provides a structure (albeit a gimmicky one), arranging the camera-ready story in five acts and 116 scenes, not including the punchy introduction that opens the book. With a heavy hand, Connelly establishes the title city, a sub-Jersey urban hellhole where a third of the population winds up in prison and the rest navigate dead-end streets with names like Felony, Delinquency, and Dyre. Among the petty hoodlums, three-time loser Don Reedy deserves points for prankish creativity: As a teenager, he lifted luxury cars from snooty neighborhoods like Padlocked Hill and Snob Gardens and returned them intact with "bits of Crumbtown" such as an empty sardine can behind the dashboard, or old milk poured under the back seat. In earning his current 15-year sentence, Reedy gained special notoriety for fronting a gang of "Robbing Hoods" that knocked off banks and threw fistfuls of cash to patrons on their way out the door. When hack TV writer Rob Landetta gets wind of the legend, he and his producer buy the rights to Reedy's story, arrange for his parole, and hire him as a consultant for a reality show about his colorful past. With Hollywood types hailing Crumbtown as a cheaper New York, the now middle-aged Reedy returns home to find his city converted into a giant set, making it impossible to distinguish between the real and the unreal. As the two worlds collide–confusing fake guns and real guns, hard cash and funny money, actual people and their fictional counterparts–Crumbtown escalates into a manic comedy that loses its bearings just as it should be reaching a screwball crescendo. As in Bringing Out The Dead, Connelly scores more than a few vivid episodes and passages, but his talent only asserts itself in pointillist flashes, unsupported by the work as a whole. With a book as frantically busy and stridently wacky as Crumbtown, even the most disciplined writer would have trouble wrangling all its complications.