Slightly over twenty-five words, but there’s the pitch for a new movie by renaissance man Michael Tolkin, follow-up to the much lauded The Player. Except of course Tolkin is not, for now at least, pitching his Among The Dead for.

The axis of the novel is death, or rather, the American Way of Death. When you die in public, he says, grief becomes society’s property, and the corpses characters with back stories; what is lacked in life automatically becomes celebrity in death. What is left behind is Frank Gale, a modestly well-off but deeply despondent minor music industry wheel who watches as his attempt at rebuilding his life from six months of adultery literally explode in his face. Suddenly Frank Gale is the man that survived Flight 221, sucked into the corporate death machine that swings immediately into action as law suits fly, blame is apportioned, and the media seek to personalise tragedy. As with his debut, Among The Dead is a largely interior piece, made up in the main of the discussions and questions that rage within Frank, and is particularly good at the flights of fancy and absurdist connections that roll through his head in a sequence of events that are essentially reactive rather than controlled. Indeed, aside from an episode where Frank visits the crash site and is arrested for suspected looting, nothing much actually happens.

Airline officials walk on eggshells so as not to offend the bereaved, the media reports on the disgruntled ex-employee that caused the crash, and Frank is driven against the state of post-Lockerbie style national mourning. This is where the novel is at its best - discussions about the effects of a five mile plunge and the identification of mangled body parts are as increasingly funny as they are ghastly; the memorial service for the victims gifts the same kind of cloying absurdity as Griffin Mill’s attendance at the funeral of the man he killed in The Player; and the haunting return in the later stages of the book of that confessional letter deliver a strategic butt-kick just when it all begins to sag slightly.

Finally though, Among The Dead suffers in comparison to Tolkin’s debut principally because something like an air crash is too big and all encompassing to satirise as effectively as the vagaries of Hollywood; absurd as the rituals surrounding death - particularly sudden, violent death - and the calculated clamouring for hard cash in compensation are, a moment like the identification of his daughter’s faceless corpse will inevitably evoke a sense of stinging pathos. Similarly, the hardening of Frank’s slide into self-pity and the re-examination of his quixotic life has the tendency to shift sympathies slightly, especially onto his long-suffering, sympathetic gay brother Lowell, and it takes moments like the sheer gut-wrenching terror that causes him to, literally, shit himself, to drag the reader back to some kind of real understanding of the intense horror at the root of all this. At least Tolkin is sure enough of his territory not to allow Frank to apportion blame for the crash onto himself.

As an author, Tolkin is assured enough to pull all these disparate and potentially bad taste strings together into a satisfying whole, even if his attempt at a resonant finale is slightly over-milked for effect. Surely the point is that, beyond all the short term sympathy and effect - rather like The Player - there really is no end, and although there he delivers a final sucker-punch, here is left ultimately with nothing but a bleak fade-out. And Hollywood would never let you get away with that.