Spy magazine co-founder Kurt Andersen's sprawling millennial satire, Turn Of The Century, is a novel of Wolfeian proportions, a hugely ambitious attempt to capture America's frenzied media culture from the inside out. In some respects, it's an unqualified triumph: Andersen's description of the near future, in which entertainment has swallowed even the most sacred institutions and reduced language to a string of pop-cultural buzzwords, is often clever and sickeningly plausible. It's also virtually unreadable, shapeless, and unwieldy. A first-time novelist, Andersen drapes 659 pages of digressions, asides, and outsized setpieces on a skeletal story that can't possibly bear the load. His principal characters, George and Lizzie, are married professionals in the most modern sense, which is to say that their infidelities are more likely to take place in the business world than the bedroom. George is a successful TV producer whose experimental new project, a "docudramedy" called Real Time ("sitcom plus news equals fun, topical drama"), threatens to sink his career and his budding network, MBC. Lizzie's career as CEO of a Silicon Alley software company is staked on a multimillion-dollar Microsoft buyout and, in the meantime, she's flirting with other offers, including one from George's boss. Her company's assets are purely speculative, which typifies the book's central thesis that the new millennium is built on a mirage; whatever values are applied to business, marriage, and family have no meaningful foundation. The title, Turn Of The Century, suggests a flip-flop in priorities: Whatever was important at the beginning of the century has been turned on its head at the end. Like Spy in its fruitful early period, Andersen's strength lies in charting examples of cultural devolution, such as a 24-hour cable network featuring nothing but raw footage of celebrity events or a café and "tasteful mini-golf" course built to attract visitors to a cemetery. But the halting rhythms of his prose and his failure to string together a compelling narrative make Turn Of The Century seem labored and slack, rather than the age-defining book its author clearly intended.