I  wonder how someone who has been gorgeous all his or her life would react to Ken Siman's wildly comic and sharply satiric first novel, Pizza Face. After all, its protagonist, Andy, could only be described as ugly and therefore probably wouldn't inspire much empathy among the beautiful people. For those who were misfits as children and adolescents, however, Pizza Face is both a nasty good time and a painful trip down memory lane.

Tall and skinny, with a face ravaged by severe acne, Andy grows up in North Carolina in the mid 1970s. He's lonely and despised by his peers, so he turns to following political campaigns for solace, relishing the hoopla and bright lights. He starts collecting campaign buttons, writes letters to politicians, and eventually develops a particular liking for Jimmy Carter, who is the only candidate to send Andy a personally autographed photo. After high school, he takes off to Washington D.C., hoping to fit in to politics somehow, and ends up the assistant to a cocaine-snorting, boy-crazy political gossip monger.

Siman uses Andy's misfortunes to create a deadpan, picaresque novel about the attractions and shallowness of beauty and power. As Andy grows up, developing crushes on a series of handsome boys and having just about everything he attempts to accomplish fall flat on its face, Siman's amazing control of tone lets the novel teeter on the borders of bitchiness, sympathy, and cruel humor without once sliding into distastefulness or sentimentality.

Andy had planned his outfit—the slippery parakeet shirt, puka-shell necklace, and earth shoes. Plus he wore a big pimple on his chin, his first...He looked at his reflection in the full-length mirror and spit on it...Andy took off his clothes. He was about to meet [Jimmy Carter] the man of his dreams and looked like doo. He settled for a plain white shirt and pinned on his favorite button, "Jimmy—the Spirit of '76." He put a little piece of masking tape over his pimple, since the only Band-Aids around were concussion size.

While Andy is the protagonist of Pizza Face, Siman creates a weird universe of peripheral characters whose lives barely but significantly intersect with Andy's life. In a series of odd, but entertaining asides, Siman takes the reader into these people's goofy lives. The most extended reverie concerns the fictitious North Carolina governor's wife, Carolina ("C.C.") Chesire, whose recipes in the "Carolina Living" section of the daily newspaper inspire Andy. Carolina's "acorn-brown hair was piled high, nearly up to providence, and made her a little taller than her husband, Governor Lucius Chesire—even though his own pompadour was pretty big, too."

Pizza Face is full of the awful and the wonderful of 1970s American culture, and one might be tempted to cry "nostalgia" if the references and details weren't so funny or perfectly integrated. The novel could also be dismissed as just another Southern grotesque, but Siman's strong sense of comedy keeps the weirdness close enough to reality to avoid self-indulgence. By far the most impressive thing about Pizza Face is the level of seriousness that lurks beneath the comedy.

Siman infuses a lot of pain into the book, forcing us to laugh even when it seems more appropriate to cry or glumly shake our heads in empathy. Pizza Face looks at the disenfranchised and marginal, using an ugly gay man as its focus, and gets the reader to see the silliness behind America's obsession with politics and beauty. Andy's twin obsessions mirror the whole country's obsession and, like too many people, when his attempts at being like the rich, beautiful and famous continue to fail, Andy's actions finally take a darker turn.

Yet Siman's off-the-wall, somewhat twisted sense of humor keeps bubbling up from the work's serious core and covers the book with a tart and frothy coating. Anyone who enjoyed John Kennedy O'Toole's A Confederacy of Dunces or Fay Weldon's The Live and Loves of a She Devil will find similar delights in Pizza Face. It's a fast, compulsive read that brings belly laughs the first time around, but offers enough intelligence and insight to encourage another look.