Joshua Cody's title, a flashy pun, is also a declaration of intent. With wordplay and quirky digression, it renders a unique and serious story in terms comfortable to its author, but probably to no one else. The literature of illness has become a contemporary genre with its own conventions and tropes. [sic] understands this and tries to breathe new life into a familiar diagnosis. This American cancer memoir is witty, knowing and strangely heartless, perhaps because, despite some sensational revelations, Joshua Cody himself is either too evasive or too shy/ arrogant (a familiar combination) to let his story speak for itself. Even allowing for his ironic self-presentation, it's hard to warm to a man who tells us that he sees himself as "an early 21st century, darkly brooding, edgy, raw postmodernist". The fundamental coldness of [sic] is all the more remarkable because, if you can stand to be in his company for more than a few pages, Cody does have an extraordinary tale to tell.

A brilliant young composer from midwestern Milwaukee, who has "no memory of not knowing how to read music", Cody was about to receive his doctorate when he was diagnosed with an aggressive cancer. When his first course of chemotherapy failed, his doctors prescribed a bone marrow transplant and radiation. The latter comes with excruciating pain. Chemo and radiation, writes Cody, are "as different as night and day, pagans and Christians, Laurel and Hardy". [sic] becomes his riposte, the narrative journal of a young man raging against the dying of the light, told through a collage of words and pictures. It's a story that lacks a beginning, a middle or an end because its "postmodernist" author is too busy showing off (or possibly, too deeply in extremis) to have time to satisfy the mundane considerations of How, When, Where and Why?

Part of the essential vanity of this publication is that Cody has been horribly overindulged, and allowed to lard his manuscript with illustrative material. [sic] is a book about sickness that should have been sent to the script doctor. It's a mess; worse, it's a pretentious mess. Descended from that great Victorian exhibitionist, "Buffalo Bill" Cody, it's almost as if he's genetically programmed to perform to the crowd. Amid a blizzard of name-dropping, WG "Max" Sebald is not mentioned, but I'd be willing to bet that part of Cody's undeclared literary baggage is a more than passing familiarity with the author of Vertigo and Austerlitz. Even the layout of [sic] owes something to Sebald.

Part of Cody's trouble is that, although he declares "I'm not really a writer", [sic] is a masterclass in that well known literary-debut genre "Look, Mum, I'm dancing". His publishers have linked the book – fatally, in my opinion – to Jean-Dominique Bauby's The Diving Bell and the Butterfly and James Frey's A Million Little Pieces. Actually, Cody's other not-so-secret influences are really the two Daves: Eggers and Foster Wallace.

The author of Infinite Jest and A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again, who committed suicide on 12 September 2008, has a lot to answer for. To Cody, Foster Wallace is "our greatest writer", but his malign influence on [sic] has been to persuade Cody that some 250 pages of sophomoric free association, loosely connected to the via crucis of contemporary oncology in which Cody's immune system became "basically that of a patient with late-stage Aids", adds up to what the publisher describes as "a heartbreaking work of brilliance". Sorry; it doesn't.

There is, however, plenty to admire in [sic]. Usually, the implicit transgression that appeals to readers in the so-called misery memoir lies in the harrowing reportage from the front line of terminal illness. But Cody, too cool for school, chooses a rather more entertaining transgression: exploiting his condition to pull women. We have barely reached page 30 before a smiling Asian girl asks Cody "whether I would like to have sex with her". Not long after this, Cody, described by the publishers as "ruthlessly grasping for life", meets the beautiful Ariel in a Manhattan restaurant and scores both cocaine and a blow job before the hors d'oeuvres. Then, a few pages further on, we hear about another woman, Daria, "not the first stripper I'd dated", which opens up several pages on the psychosexual issues surrounding prostitution.

"Why relate all this?" Cody asks at one point, a killer question to which he really has no adequate response. Perhaps if he had not flirted with narrative riffing a la Foster Wallace, he might have made his terrible experiences speak to the world of the well. His hallucinatory chapter "Sister Morphine" almost makes up for this omission. As it is, [sic] reads like a sick joke, a prolix epigram on the death of a feeling. When, at the end, the reader remains unsure whether Cody is fully cured, or still fatally ill, we neither know nor care.