True Failure – Alex Higley

[Coffee House Press; 2025]

Few American spectacles beg for literary treatment quite so much as the ABC television series Shark Tank. In 2014, when the show was entering its fifth season, the writer Jia Tolentino noted that almost no show is so skilled in smoothing over the “illogical juxtapositions” of twenty-first-century capitalism: “America being a place with that particular fuzzed-over tension between millionaire and middle class—the former pretending to be the latter; the latter believing the former is our eventual due—Shark Tank bridges the gap with ease.”

Based on a Canadian television series (Dragon’s Den) that was based on a Japanese television series (Tiger of Money), Shark Tank is probably best understood as a meta-product: a slickly produced and now widely syndicated program committed to the showcasing of other, sillier products. You may have worn a pair of Bombas socks; you may have used a Scrub Daddy in your aunt’s kitchen; you probably haven’t eaten the caffeinated waffles pitched in 2012, but if you ever have the misfortune to pass through an American supermarket, you almost certainly will encounter one of Shark Tank’s myriad and unbelievably non-essential products. I am, admittedly, a regular viewer. I am, apparently, in fraternity with approximately three million other Americans who tuned in last season. And since this is the twenty-first century and capitalism is nothing if not global, I should also note the 45 (!) other licensed versions of the series airing in countries across the planet. It gives me no pleasure to report that the only organization I found readily capable of supplying an updated count was the United Nations.

Alex Higley’s newest novel True Failure features another (unlicensed and entirely fictional) spin on the show’s formula. After Ben Silas, a thirty-year old suburbanite, is laid off from his job in downtown Chicago, he commits himself to two projects: binging five episodes a day of Law & Order SVU at a Chicago public library and applying to appear on the TV show Big Shot. “Really what you’re saying is that you think you can luck your way onto the show. Which is going to take a lot of work. And it won’t be luck. It will be work,” Ben’s friend Nguyen tells him early in the novel. Like much of Higley’s dialogue, this exchange continues to accumulate meaning: Ben treats his attempt to appear on the show like a day-job, but it’s a day-job he’s not particularly good at, a day-job he’s lucky to keep.

The problem for Ben—besides his credit card debt and waning severance package—is that he doesn’t have an idea to pitch on the show. “Having to fully account for any of these hypothetical products was not something Ben felt he would ever be up to. He had nothing.” All Ben possesses is a “raw, empty want” and his own unemployed self. Inside this absence, True Failure’s antics begin to populate: Marcy, a television producer, develops a fascination with Ben’s “clear self-delusion and jarring lack of preparation.” Her assistant, Callie, fabricates increasingly absurd briefings about a murder from Marcy’s childhood. Tara, Ben’s wife, begins to phone the production team to emphasize that even though Ben may be advancing through the casting process, he really doesn’t have an idea. SVU’s Mariska Hargitay, hilariously, functions as a kind of muse for Ben.

Tara is the novel’s most vibrant character. While Ben spends the novel lost, unemployed, and reminding himself (via the CBAs: “1. confidence, 2. belief, 3. ability to believe in 1 and 2”) to believe in his own self-belief, Tara runs a small childcare business from their home. She is uninspired by the work, wanting children of her own. She refuses to make excuses for why she didn’t find a career as a painter. Through some descriptive sleight of hand, Mariska Hartigay’s presence in the novel serves to highlight Tara’s fortitude. Ben describes Hargitay as the perfect Big Shot contestant: “[She] could believably play a woman starting a business later in life … Someone emboldened by self-belief and determination, yet vulnerable … A vulnerable person but not a helpless person. A person with quiet strength.” Higley means this as a more apt description for Tara herself. Tara, like Hargitay’s character on SVU, is the survivor of assault. She becomes a linchpin for any potential appearance Ben has on Big Shot. And she, notably, is the only character in this novel who manages to negotiate a Shark Tank-like deal…

Tara, seizing strength as a dealmaker while pining for meaning elsewhere, represents one of the illogical juxtapositions that Shark Tank papers over. But whereas a reality television show like Shark Tank or Big Shot might smooth these tensions, True Failure wants to lay these illogical juxtapositions bare. At times, Alex Higley achieves this through his gift for textured characterization, his deep, third-person point of view allowing us access to Ben’s warring desires for both attention and community. At other times, illogic runs unrestrained through the story itself. True Failure—like any portrayal of American capitalism, critical or propagandistic—is unable to withstand the weight of its own contradictions. It’s no surprise then when Higley’s climax dissolves into a cartoonish riot.

I have to admit: there is something uncomfortably nostalgic about True Failure. Not necessarily a nostalgia for the first half of the twentieth century, but almost certainly a nostalgia for the second half. True Failure, deliberately or not, hearkens back to a certain kind of novel from the not-too-distant-past. A novel concerned with commercialization, set against suburban sprawl, eager to remind us that “TV is a made-up thing.” Maybe this is the kind of novel Don DeLillo wrote. Maybe this novel never existed. Maybe this novel has never existed as vividly as its archetype, but we all know the kind: It’s a novel from a time when the novel was a sufficient form for capturing the illogical juxtapositions of capitalism and its surrounding media ecosystem. In one such familiar moment, Higley writes:

And yet what was he doing? What the fuck was he doing? He couldn’t keep at it. If he saw a man doing what he was doing on a TV show, a character doing what he was doing and had been doing in the library, in some movie, some book, not only would he not believe it, he wouldn’t understand it.

Reading this passage, I’m captivated by its charm. The screen (and maybe even the book) can’t fully depict a character like Ben or the world he occupies. I worry, though: Is TV still a made-up thing? Or is everything now just TV? True Failure, in foregrounding Ben’s attempt to appear on a reality show, more or less elides the fact that we can create our own reality shows with the phones in our pockets. The novel eloquently addresses a media ecosystem in which we can binge Big Shot and SVU and then write a novel about these same consumption habits, but it doesn’t fully engage with our exact cultural moment, when personal algorithms have distilled these same shows into ten-second attention-draining reels. Media in the year 2025, after all, is marked as much by addiction as irreality. As a result, few parts of True Failure feel fresher than Ben’s indulgence in online sports betting:

Yet, again, he had action. D.J LeMahieu over 1.5 hits at +300. Rockies on the road in LA +2 runs at -200, Sox home money line against the Twins at -250. $25 down would pay #185 if it hit. He constructed his parlay with a game in three different time zones, so with any luck, Ben would have something to distract him for the course of the entire night.

Yet, again, let me level-set: I like sports betting as much as reality television. Maybe as much as literature, although I don’t think I could admit it. All of the above would make satisfactory fodder for a novel for this individual reader. But the previous passage strikes me not because of its content but because it could be written at no other time than the present, when most readers have abandoned primetime television for the promise that better luck is only a swipe away. True Failure may inspire nostalgia or remind us of a bygone era, and at times, its media ecosystem may not even feel like our own. Still, there are delights to be found in both the “then” as well as the “now.”

Garrett Biggs grew up in California. These days, he is a fiction writer, critic, and PhD candidate in Literature & Creative Writing at the University of Utah. Read more at garrettbiggs.net.