A new novel, ‘Slab Rat,’ delves into the glossy, glammy world of magazines such as Details and Vanity Fair and reveals the smugness and bitterness that the author finds so characteristic of . . .The Rag Race

When Ted Heller worked as a photo researcher at Details magazine, he switched desks every day, and few people knew his name. It was only after Heller filed a 35-millimeter slide in the wrong folder that the higher-ups noticed him. They screamed as if he had misplaced the Mona Lisa. He quit instantly.

His three months at Details, however, seemed amiable and warm compared with the arctic air at Vanity Fair.

“I’d never been in such a glacial atmosphere,” Heller said in an e-mail exchange recently. “I’d be walking through the hallways, and it was as if I were invisible.” He lasted two weeks in the cold.

Those days, however, helped crystallize Heller’s debut novel, “Slab Rat” (Scribner, $23), a riotously scathing satire of back-biting, bitterness and brutal office politics in the New York glossy magazine world. Now the very magazines where Heller once barely rated a nod in the hallways are lining up to celebrate him.

Vanity Fair has taken his picture. The New Yorker has profiled him. Everyone else is trying to figure out what might be fact, what might be fiction and which big-time editor might really have called acclaimed photographer Richard Avedon to take her passport photo.

“I was more concerned with my double chin and the bags under my eyes than with the irony,” Heller said. “Graydon Carter, for whom I worked at Spy, lives near me, and I occasionally see him at our local coffee joint. Months before publication of ‘Slab Rat,’ I would tell him that he should read my book and that he might like it.

“In the back of my mind, however, was the notion that he might hate it and put out a contract on the life of me, my dog and girlfriend. It turns out that he loved the book. Whew! I’m safe.”

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Those bags under his eyes might be the unfortunate result of the guessing game that has consumed the glossy world as usually only Tina Brown gossip can.

“It baffles me, suffocates me. I had to take a tranquilizer last night, I was so upset,” Heller said. “Yesterday I read in a British paper that I based the character of Leslie Usher-Soames on Emma Soames, the former editor of Tattler. Well, guess what? When I read that, that was the first time I’d ever heard of Emma Soames! Another article says I based the character Roddy Grissom Jr. on Si Newhouse’s nephew. I didn’t know Si Newhouse had a nephew! This speculation game is just preposterous. I understand it, but, man, is it ever wrong!

“I had no idea how despicable some reporters were until now. Next time I see Bobby Knight throw a hand grenade at a reporter, I won’t be thinking: ‘Man, he’s a nut!’ I’ll just be thinking, ‘Man, I hope his aim is good.’ ”

The many ironies surrounding the book’s reception, however, only make Heller’s satire of a world with an unending capacity for smugness and self-importance ring even more true. “Slab Rat” is set at fictional Versailles Publishing, where Zachary Arlen Post is a once-hot editor at a Vanity Fair-esque magazine called It. Post’s rise is fast being eclipsed by newcomer Mark Larkin.

Now, Post’s real name is Allen Zachary Post. He really went to Hofstra, and he didn’t actually study at Liverpool. He’s terrified of being exposed as a phony, knows how plastic and predictable the world of buzz and trend-spotting is, yet he also wants desperately to move ahead. And when Larkin arrives, that much more facile and shameless, on-the-make and on-the-move, well, office politics turn poisonous.

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Post has the proper sense of ridiculousness.

“In every issue of a Versailles magazine, you can find the phrases ‘enfant terrible,’ ‘wunderkind,’ ‘Peck’s bad boy’ and ‘Young Turk,’ ” Post notes. “People think they’re doing something great or putting out something every month that rivals ‘Moby-Dick’ or ‘Portrait of a Lady’ when, in fact, they’re just emitting oceans of ads for foolish products.”

And Heller, 43, delights in the details of things like meetings where the overpaid editors gather and brainstorm the puns-cum-cliches for cover text.

“In Vanity Fair’s defense, they’ve straightened out their act lately. Instead of cover lines such as ‘The Liam King’ or ‘This Place is the Brad Pitts!’ they now would just have ‘Liam Neeson’ and ‘Brad Pitt,’ ” he said.

Such overblown self-importance isn’t specific to the magazine world, Heller said, even if it might be at its most ludicrous there.

“There might be training sessions at 7-Eleven or Kinko’s that tell their prospective employees they’re about to embark on a noble enterprise, when all they’re doing is learning how to make Slurpees or photocopies,” he said. “However, I think that there are a few out there who think they are creating great, great art, and the fact that it’s all amid a sea of ads for Chanel and Absolut and that the article was engineered by a star’s publicist just doesn’t sink in.”

These days, Heller is a staff writer and photo editor at Nickelodeon magazine, and he notices many of the same competitive pressures there.

“We still struggle for days on end to come up with something clever for a cover with Britney Spears and the Backstreet Boys. When that is happening, when we’re on our fourth meeting and staring at the same image, I just start to think to myself: ‘What the hell am I doing here?’ . . . I took the Nickelodeon job because. . . . I was out of work and needed money. You know, I applied for a full-time job at Conde Nast, and the interview was mildly terrifying; I even had an interview at Vogue!

“The atmosphere at Nickelodeon is very good. However, 80% of what I do is clerical work. I file, I sort, I count. I hate it, but it pays the rent and puts the broccoli with garlic sauce and white rice on the table.”

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Heller’s a third of the way through a second novel--it does not take place in the magazine world--but he says he failed so many times at writing that, despite the buzz over “Slab Rat,” he has no faith this one will get published. There’s never any guarantee, he said, which could be one lesson he picked up watching the career of his father, the late novelist Joseph Heller, who wrote “Catch-22.”

“My father would have been happy with me if I was happily employed in any profession at all. When I was in the clothing business and making decent money, he was happy. He never pushed me at all,” Heller said. “Everybody asks me about what lessons my father taught me. Nobody ever brings up my mother, who, after all, taught me to read. If I learned anything about writing, it’s from reading a lot.”

And if he learned anything about getting ahead in the magazine world, it’s this: Lie, blackmail and kill. “Yes, and wear decent clothes,” Heller quipped. “Five-hundred-dollar eyeglasses will help, too.”