by JULIET WATERS

Christmas is always a thorny time for the nice nihilist. As Andrew Boyd has written in his brilliant self-help parody, Daily Afflictions, these days "it is naïve to care, gauche to be sincere and downright suspicious to believe in a better tomorrow. But underneath your cool indifference you probably do care, although you distrust these feelings and you're ashamed to reveal them…" His solution: irony. "In a faithless age irony is the only way to take yourself seriously, and the only way to show others that you distrust yourself enough for others to trust you."

And so we celebrate the holy holiday with our dollar-store crèches and Virgin Mary fridge magnets. Behold Mike Bryan's The Afterword. This palm-sized book is a 200-page afterword to the New York Times bestselling book of all time, The Deity Next Door. Wondering why you've never heard of this bestseller? It doesn't exist. The Afterword fits easily into a Christmas stocking and a tradition of metafiction that includes Jose Luis Borges reviews of books that were never written and Dave Eggers' afterword to A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius.

If Deity did exist, it would be the story of a modern-day messiah known only as Blaine who lives with his wife, his son and his black Labrador, Gore-Tex. We know little about Blaine's family background, or even what he looks like, though we can guess at a solid WASP background. We do know, however, that he's a computer programmer and has the power to cure his son of cancer, to levitate furniture and win big in Vegas.

Far more clever is Bryan's characterization of the kind of person who writes these bland new-age books of spiritual inspiration. The nameless author of The Deity Next Door is a hack writer with more ideas than talent. His failed attempts at books in the past include Shrinks They Do the Talking, We Listen: Interviews with Psychiatrists, which he ended up abandoning after deciding that, with few exceptions, psychologists and psychiatrists are some of the dullest people alive. Before the success of Deity, he wrote ads for Federal Express disguised as sports columns, but was let go because his sentences were too long. Though he wrote Deity with no intentions at irony, one cannot believe the same of Bryan. This is Bryan's first novel and one has to take a bit of a leap of faith to assume he's a much better writer himself.

The book cannot be written brilliantly since a brilliant writer would never write the kind of pseudo-Christian dreck that The Deity Next Door so obviously is. At the same time the narrator doesn't seem to be a charlatan, and there's a sincerity to the book that is surprisingly engaging. The challenges he faces in writing a new-age bestseller are thought provoking. What would a second messiah accomplish in a world where nobody would believe in him anyway? Would he bother preaching, since no one of any influence would listen? And if he did, would he have a message that was different from the one Christ had? Let's say he wasn't here as a prequel to the end of the world. Why bother coming? As long as he believes in free will, he can't really do much. Perhaps he's here because God has something to learn from being human?

For a critic, the most interesting question of course is whether The Deity Next Door would have been a mega bestseller if it had actually been written. Well, I believe. And if you have any doubts you might want to take a look at the current mega-selling The Five People You Meet in Heaven by Mitch Albom. It couldn't be much worse than that. In the end, Bryan has indeed performed a significant and merciful Christian act. He has sacrificed his one bestseller so that the world wouldn't have to read it. Praise be to Blaine.

The Afterword by Mike Bryan, Pantheon, hc, 197pp, $25