Survivor: San Fran

Oh the Glory of It All

By Sean Wilsey

Penguin, 482 pp., $25.95

The writer David Foster Wallace argued in a 1993 interview that it's impossible to spend as many ''slack-jawed, spittle-chinned, formative hours" in front of the TV as he and many writers of his generation did ''without internalizing the idea that one of the main goals of art is simply to 'entertain,' give people sheer pleasure." Some of the gags and stunts of his writing unfold, he admitted, not ''in the service of the story itself" but to say to the reader '' 'Hey! Look at me! Have a look at what a good writer I am! Like me!' "

Sean Wilsey's compulsively readable memoir, ''Oh the Glory of It All," eschews the treacherous syntax and emotional barrenness of Wallace's fiction but displays precisely this TV-like impulse to entertain at the expense of a more resonant story. Given the craft on display in a recent New Yorker excerpt, the book could have been a moving, insightful look at the incompatible excesses of two narcissistic parents (and a mean-spirited stepmother), and the effects of these competing extremisms on their child. Instead, it amounts to the literary equivalent of reality TV. Wilsey's frenzied parade of personal revelations meanders hither and yon, but ultimately lands the reader few places she hasn't been before.

The book opens in promising territory. Wilsey's mother, the daughter of itinerant Oklahoma preachers, rebels against the religion and poverty of her childhood but retains enough of her parents' magnetism and zeal to marry herself the hell out of Dodge. Twelve years later, she divorces and moves to San Francisco. There she reinvents herself as a society columnist and television personality, and marries a self-made San Francisco millionaire, Alfred Wilsey. Sean, the product of their union, idolizes his charismatic mother, shares a love for Playboy with his Lothario father, and thinks everything is hunky-dory until his dad leaves his mom for her best friend, Dede. The split keeps the press busy for months. Sean is not quite 11 when his father and Dede marry.

A jumble of distracting, poorly explicated cultural references aside (at the start of the first chapter, Sean compares his mother to characters from ''Sunset Boulevard," ''Gentlemen Prefer Blondes," and ''Mommie Dearest" before settling into the business of actually describing her), these early pages glide by like water.

Enter the wicked stepmother. According to Sean, Dede identifies his mother's ''greatest weakness (pride and vanity), stole her greatest asset (family), mocked Mom's presence in a world where she didn't belong (society), lit Mom's fuse, and watched her explode." He likens the ''whole thing" to a plotline on ''Dynasty, or Dallas, or (one of Dede's favorite shows, which she claimed was partly modeled on us) Falcon Crest." Like many other contemporary writers, Wilsey invokes cultural references like mantras, using them to move through spaces where he would otherwise be expected to excavate the true conflict and sadness of his characters. He takes the individual experience and replaces it with its pop-cultural echo.

The particularized indignities to which Dede subjects our narrator are far more absorbing. These include, but are not limited to: housing him in an unheated attic; spoiling her own sons with expensive gifts at holidays while presenting Sean with fruit and sweaters; and painting him as a thief. Yet the Dede passages increasingly read like a legal indictment mingled with notes from a teenager's diary, particularly once Sean divulges the many sexual fantasies of which she is the star. Through the end, as she no doubt did in life, she overshadows Sean's father, who appears to the reader as a mostly disapproving presence with occasional flashes of benevolence.

Wilsey is at his best when recalling his mother's excesses and his youthful efforts to contain them. In part these sections stand out because his mother, a dynamic woman, resists being reduced to a cardboard villain or cultural mile marker. But mostly they linger in the memory because Sean loves and admires his mother as much as he is baffled by her. He temporarily forgets his own travails in striving to depict her fairly.

After the divorce, she falls into a paralyzing depression, rousing herself from bed most memorably to insist that she and Sean hurl themselves from their penthouse window. Sean manages to talk her down, but sleeps in her bed that night to prevent her from changing her mind. Not long after the suicide proposal, a sign from God unexpectedly kick-starts her messiah complex. Seized with a commitment to world peace, she drags Sean and some other children to the four corners of the earth, meeting the pope, Indira Gandhi, Helmut Kohl, and some of Moscow's top brass along the way. Although he ultimately disavows his mother's project, Sean clings to these meetings as evidence of his worth whenever Dede mistreats him.

The story loses focus and resonance as it wanders from the locus of childhood pain and early adolescence into the years of teenagerhood. Sean is shipped from one boarding school to another. He tries to escape his misfit status by becoming a disloyal friend, a skater, and a pothead. He gets arrested. Finally, he pulls himself together at a school set in a 16th-century villa in Tuscany.

Sean confesses in the book's final pages to fear of ''the first reviewer who tells me I feel too sorry for myself, I'm too messy, . . . I've taken up too much of your time." This preemptive critique embodies the weakness pervading his memoir: the relentless need to please, and to earn not just the reader's approval, but her absolution. Had Rousseau been half as concerned with our opinion of him, we might have liked him more. But we would not have continued to read his ''Confessions" nearly three centuries later.

Maud Newton, of the literary website MaudNewton.com, is a writer living in Brooklyn.