by JULIET WATERS

While Victoria About vacations, she plans her next novel. "What I'll be writing, From the Lighthouse, will, if it comes out right, be just the best beach book in the world, ever: naughty, gossipy–with just the right ratio of tittle to tattle. (You know what I mean, darlings, and don't pretend you don't.)"

Victoria is the narrator of Finding Myself, Toby Litt's uneven, meandering, but often very funny satire of chick lit. Finding Myself isn't the best beach book in the world. It's more the kind of book you can dip into for cool bursts of satire, then easily abandon as your thoughts, like Victoria's, drift to things like "windsurfers, wondering how ever they manage to stay up–and go so fast–and why they bother in the first place... etcetera."

Litt is one of Britain's rising stars, author of deadkidsongs, Exhibitionism and Ghost Story. With Finding Myself, he's solved the worst problem facing early-career male British writers: how to survive if you're not Nick Hornby. Chick lit is the genre that sells in Britain, so a chick-lit parody seems like a bright idea.

To be fair, it isn't all fluff. There are sly digs at postmodern meta-texts and references to Virginia Woolf, whose To The Lighthouse is, well, a lot better. Still, Litt's novel is clearly pitched more to smart beach readers than English profs. A broad education in reality television (with a minor in Scooby Doo) is probably more crucial than a literature degree.

Written in a breezy, glib, stream-of-consciousness style, Finding Myself starts with Victoria's book proposal: "I can't write this in neat, organised sections - you know how I am. So I'm just going to blather it out whichwise-whatever, and let you on that basis make up your mind."

From the Lighthouse is not a novel "per se," it's more of a concept. Victoria will invite about a dozen people to a beach house for a month, observe them, sometimes with hidden cameras, and write a book about the experience. What we get in the end is her synopsis of what she thinks will happen - who will have affairs, who will develop crushes, who will fall in love, who will propose marriage - and then her journal entries for the month. This is kind of the novel as blog - until, of course, it looks like the house may be haunted.

Apparently, Victoria was the kind of kid who, after watching Snow White for the first time, pestered her mother to make her an Evil Queen costume. Narcissistic, manipulative and deluded, she's the perfect unreliable narrator. Her foil is her editor, Simona, who, it turns out, is also a guest in the house. Almost as much fun as Victoria's nasty self-serving insights about people and society, is Simona's editing and comments in the margin.

Sentences and paragraphs, usually about Simona, are crossed out in a way that we can still read the original. Simona's funniest observations are usually when Victoria comes close to a serious thought. A meditation on how the world might be different if women ran it (especially funny for anyone familiar with Woolf's A Room of One's Own) is crossed out with a brusque comment, "Hello, Germaine–and goodbye." Eventually, the comment that accompanies much slashing, "pretentious beyond belief," is replaced with an abbreviation, PBB. The hostility between writer and editor is increasingly evident, until it develops into an unexpected and important plot turn.

There's no question Litt has much to say on the dumbing down of British culture. At the same time, he can't entirely hide his affection for Victoria and her desperation to be that impossible thing, a powerful and important writer. It's hard to get at the truth of what happens in the house, especially given that this is actually fiction. If there is one actual truth, however, it's that there's probably more than a little Victoria in every writer.

Finding Myself by Toby Litt, Penguin, pb, 427pp., $24