Gus Van Sant is responsible for some of the more diverting and, in the case of 1993's Even Cowgirls Get The Blues, worst films of the past decade. He is also a published photographer and modest but accomplished musician. Even so, Pink, you might be surprised to learn, is his very first novel.

Narration is via 52-year-old Pacific North-western industrial film-maker Spunky Davis. He tells of friends and a life spent in infomercials. Friends like sparky "teenaged host" Felix who often fronted his films but who recently overdosed, and Jack who reminds Spunky of his dead friend. Jack and his partner Matt have plans to make films of their own, like Cowboy Nemo, about a bunch of identical superheroes who meet each year for a superpower battle. Spunky likes Jack and Matt.

Even a casual glance reveals Van Sant's novel as something less than conventional: its pages riot with typefaces, naive sketches, copious footnotes, even a flickbook of Spunky's lost experimental debut. Excerpts run throughout too of a surreal SF action film Spunky is writing for his own amusement - "$-GREAT SKULL ZERO-$" - and the story of Blake, a rock star who channelled all his spare cash to feed a heavy plant machinery habit.

But for all its playfulness, the book holds together in surprising ways; lack of narrative is never a drawback. Its tone is frequently comic, albeit set with a drifting melancholy surrounding Felix: "He was like a little Elvis...Before he left everything was the same, but now, everything is different. Now there is a hissing sound. There is an awareness of wasted unending events."

There is perhaps autobiography in these pages too, echoing both Van Sant's own sexuality, and the death of teen star River Phoenix (My Own Private Idaho) in Felix's ugly demise on the sidewalk outside of a club.

And as if all of that isn't burden enough, Van Sant punctuates events with some well-judged musings on the nature of film itself. As local indie hot-shot Buzz declaims: "Adults...like to think that the story they are hearing is different somehow from the one they heard before, but in the end all they want to hear is the same story. Good really means: familiar."

Exuberant, ironic, intelligent and touching, Pink cherrypicks the best of the Van Sant canon (the records, Drugstore Cowboy, To Die For, Idaho), and welds it into an irresistible freewheeling Richard Linklater-ish sketch of film and youth culture. Seriously recommended.