Brian Joseph Davis’s I, Tania is an experimental novella, one that plays with ideas of celebrity and pop culture in a grab-bag approach that very nearly proves self-defeating.

The book is presented as the autobiography of Patty Hearst’s alter ego “Tania,” the alias she adopted after being kidnapped and brainwashed by the Symbionese Liberation Army in 1974. The premise – a media baron’s daughter joins a terrorist sex cult and robs banks – seems ideal for a time when wealthy heiresses and revolutionary jargon are common cultural currency.

The autobiography is part of the joke, though. Davis has other plans: the book’s introduction detours into an entry from the Lonely Planet Guide to Symbia, complete with contemporary pop songs rewritten as Marxist anthems.

Davis, author of the similarly minded poetry collection Portable Altamont, is clearly taken with his own clever pop-culture allusions, socialist-themed humour, and sly literary references. He practically abandons his main conceit, which makes you wonder what his interest in Patty Hearst was in the first place. The actual details of Hearst’s kidnapping are only loosely sketched out, played for comedic value rather than insight. Instead, the book zips back into pop culture with a Marxist deconstruction of The Bad News Bears. The second part of the book takes a turn for the metafictional, with Tania and a literary agent discussing the merits of some of the text we’ve just read. Before getting too far into this, however, the story diverts again to an even longer academic film reading of Cujo. (The film’s title was also the alias of one of the SLA members.)

The separate threads of I, Tania are curious, though not quite funny enough to be self-sustaining. Nor do they work as satire, because the targets are too diffuse for a sustained attack. The book is playful but pointless, but that may not matter. It should still appeal to fans of 1970s and ’80s pop culture and cultural theory, and those who can appreciate a good Donald Barthelme joke.