by JULIET WATERS

I guess I just wanted to keep the Christmas cheer going last New Year's Eve when I rented Bad Santa. On my first attempt at watching it, a few hours before heading out for drunken festivities, I just couldn't get into it. Upon returning from drunken festivities, I gave it another shot, but passed out to the bouncing beat of Lauren Graham yelling, "Fuck me, Santa! Fuck me, Santa!" Finally, the next day, hungover to the point of paralysis, I gave Bad Santa one last try, and needless to say, I loved it. There are worse ways to spend the first week of the year than chuckling over the impenetrable, subtle genius of lines like, "I don't think you should be digging in your ass," which, in case you haven't seen the movie is dialogue directed at Santa, not the kids.

My point here is that Everyone's Pretty is one of those books that may demand a certain frame of mind. Lydia Millet's meandering tale of an alcoholic pornographer with a messianic complex is funny, dark and surprisingly tender in unexpected places. Plot-wise, however, it's something of a drunk dream.

Millet, judging from the biographical notes, seems to be someone who likes to change her own frame of mind a lot. Born in Boston, she grew up in Toronto with her Egyptologist father and teacher/librarian mother. Young adulthood was spent living in L.A. copy editing for Hustler, Busty Beauties, a gun magazine (S.W.A.T) and Fighting Knives: America's Most Incisive Cutlery Publication. On her way to New York she received an M.A. in environmental policy at Duke. Currently she lives on a patch of desert just outside of Tucson, Arizona, and summers in Anchorage.

Her first novel, Omnivores, sounds like it may be a good bet for anyone who's getting restless with The O.C. (or expects to after February sweeps and the bisexual teen girl plot line is over.) As described on the inside cover, it's a "coming-of-age novel satire in which a young girl in Orange County is sold by her tyrant father to a real estate agent and gives birth to a cannibal baby." Millet's second novel, George Bush, Dark Prince of Love, was told from the point of view of a woman who develops a desperate obsession with Bush Sr., and with supplanting first lady Barbara. My Happy Life, a book about a Polyanna-type heroine who remains chronically clueless throughout a life of horrifying abuse won a 2002 PEN-USA award.

Everyone's Pretty is more of an ensemble experiment than past work. Dean Decetes, the barely functional anti-hero, is the cog that connects four other points of view: His sister, Bucella, a Catholic zealot with a schoolgirl crush on her boss; Bucella's neighbour, a teenage girl math genius attempting an escape from school and parents with serious boundary issues; Bucella's co-worker Alice, a lonely, depressed, but likeable office slut; and Phil, a repressed Christian Scientist so terrified of sin that he forbids his dangerously dim, too-sexy wife, Barbara, from watching Murder She Wrote, "a virtual Gomorrah of prime-time indecency in which females far past their prime rudely rejected appropriate modes of behavior and seldom if ever acknowledged their spiritual debt to the savior."

You get the picture. Just another day in L.A. amidst the war of the righteous and the wicked. Life here is not pretty, unless qualified as pretty insane. These characters attempt the challenging feat of meandering through five days of cultural and spiritual squalor in ways that are alternatively absurd, mundane and hilarious. Millet has many talents as a writer, but one of her greatest is creating scraps of dialogue that sound like the accidentally significant and funny stuff that is the reason people watch reality TV. Take Bucella's reaction to finding Dean entangled with Phil's wife. "You have sunk as low as you can, Dean... she is mentally challenged. And married!"

Pure poetry. In the right frame of mind.

Everyone's Pretty by Lydia Millet, Soft Skull Press, pb, 200pp, $17.95