Options: The Secret Life of Fake Steve Jobs

By Dan Lyons

(Da Capo Press, 276 pages, $22.95)

“It is Tuesday afternoon. I am barefoot, sitting on a cushion in the lotus position, gazing at a circuit board.”

So begins Options: The Secret Life of Fake Steve Jobs, the highly anticipated “novel” by Forbes editor Dan Lyons, based on The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs, his wildly popular spoof blog that captured Silicon Valley’s imagination last year.

Fake Steve’s reverie is interrupted by an annoying underling who arrives bearing bad news: Apple and its iconic leader are under investigation for backdating options—or manipulating stock grants to ensure a high payout. Over the next 250 pages, Fake Steve meditates, says Namaste a lot, fires underlings, hurls racist epithets at Asian federal prosecutors, kvetches with fellow honchos Larry Ellison and Richard Branson, and generally seeks to avoid responsibility for the corporate scandal that almost scuttled his charmed reign.

The book, which arrives in stores November 1, hits many of the familiar points captured on the blog: the arrogant aloofness of Apple’s co-founder and C.E.O., the navel-gazing culture of Silicon Valley and the tech media, and an almost messianic belief that well-designed consumer technology will somehow solve the world’s ills—and garner Fake Steve the Nobel Peace Prize.

Lyons has a wickedly keen ear for Silicon Valley humor. And he’s produced a comedy of Valley manners that will leave some in stitches. The book will provide more than a few chortles if you happen to be a venture-capital titan, Valley drone, or tech blogger. And there are certain moments when Fake Steve’s blithe naïveté is truly funny—like when he asks if Iran president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is “the micro-loan dude.”

There’s just one problem: Options isn’t very good. The book, which barely nods in the direction of a coherent plot, ultimately comes across as a slapped-together effort designed to capitalize on the blog’s unlikely, viral success. Options is a confection—small and sweet, but not exactly nutritious.

This was inevitable, really.

A major part of the reason Fake Steve Jobs was so popular among Silicon Valley denizens had to do with the parlor game of outing him. Before he was unmasked, the question of Fake Steve’s identity almost seemed to rival the question of who might buy Facebook. Tech-gossip blog Valleywag hunted the clandestine author like Ahab tracking the white whale. But once New York Times reporter Brad Stone outed Lyons as the surreptitious scribe, Fake Steve lost much of his luster. With apologies to B.B. King, the thrill was gone.

True, the book will score points with the sort of person who appreciates the idea of “freako engineers with Asperger’s syndrome driving Ferraris” or baked tech honchos “cruising” the Tenderloin—San Francisco’s skid row—by Hummer in the middle of the night, “wearing balaclavas and commando outfits and firing Super Soakers at transvestite hookers.” Or those familiar with the restaurant Il Fornaio. Or the Garden Court Hotel.

But if the publishers think this book is going to appeal to the general public, then, well, they’re as delusional as, say, those who think that the U.S. will adopt a flat tax anytime soon. The tome is studded with so many “inside baseball” Silicon Valley references that the average reader will be left in the dark.

If there is one lesson to be learned from Options, it’s that Silicon Valley is just as self-absorbed and inbred as the media world.

The real problem with the book is that it mistakes obnoxiousness for humor. I realize that the point is to send up Silicon Valley’s “Zen Palace”-dwelling moguls, but there is something slightly unfunny about basing a satire on the single largest corporate scandal of the past year—one that is still unfolding—especially when it is far from apparent that the real Steve Jobs is really blameless in this mess, despite the S.E.C.’s not prosecuting him.

Options backdating is the practice of artificially timing stock-option grants to ensure a high payout. The Wall Street Journal won the Pulitzer Prize for public service last year for exposing the practice—which appears to have been nothing short of an epidemic across corporate America, especially in the tech world. The technique made dozens of corporate executives millions of dollars richer.

So far the scandal has ensnared more than 130 companies and led to the firing or resignation of more than 50 executives. Some are off to jail. It’s easy to chalk the story up to yet another esoteric corporate-accounting scandal, but in the zero-sum game of stock market investing, for every ill-begotten dollar obtained through illegal backdating, there is a loser on the other side of the deal. And it’s not a Ferrari-driving tech mogul.

Still, for those who spend a not-insignificant portion of their time thinking about Steve Jobs, some elements of the book will resonate. Valley folks will burn through it. The greater public will be bored, unless the novel’s denouement comes to pass. Stay tuned.