In one of the more exacting moments in Ted Heller's Slab Rat, a delectably poisonous roman a clef about the magazine business, a senior editor at a glossy monthly called It deploys her frantic assistant to ask how she can get a passport in time for the Cannes Film Festival. Before he can stop himself, the book's hero—a lowly young associate editor named Zachary Post—foolishly suggests a place that snaps five-dollar photos. A quick phone call and $4,000 later, she has a 2 x 2 1/2-inch picture courtesy of Richard Avedon. This sort of excess is common at Versailles Publishing, which is rife with backbiting, vanity, ruthless status seeking, and petty humiliations; everything, it seems, except for decent writing. Heller, the prodigiously gifted son of Catch-22 author Joseph Heller, has parlayed his brief stint as a writer for Vanity Fair into a savagely funny attack on the runaway elitism and politicking he experienced at Condé Nast. But he's just as hard on his ostensible protagonist (alter ego?), who gradually discovers how much he has in common with his enemies. Cruising unsteadily on an invented past (Liverpool University, Berkeley, heir to a steel and real-estate fortune) that's less embarrassing than his real one (Queens, Hofstra, father in the swimming-pool-supply business), Post's ascent at It has suddenly reached a plateau. His insecurity is stoked by Mark Larkin, a new hire with a toothy Teddy Roosevelt smile who schemes his way up the ladder. Meanwhile, Post's affections are divided between diametrically opposed women: one a chilly but appealingly hyphenated Brit with a breeding line to Winston Churchill, the other a sweet and unpretentious intern with genuine feelings for him. Heller's dense plotting dovetails toward a gracefully sinister conclusion, even though his bitter satire comes at the expense of more richly dimensioned characters. Slab Rat works best when it details flash's perpetual triumph over substance, which starts in the magazine's sleek Manhattan offices and spills right onto its perfumed pages. In this environment, a flair for the written word is the least essential talent.