In advance of summer trip season, Lexus Magazine has launched a collaborative novel, "In the Belly of the Beast," which seems to be about a young-ish new hire at Google who prepares for the move out West by buying herself a "sweet Lexus sedan" and hitting the highway with her morose anthropologists fiance. She has doubts about the relationship; he has doubts about the car.

Sample passage from the opening chapter by Arthur Phillips:
"When we first started dating and he used to take me to hear music from countries I'd never heard of, in bars I once would have avoided, I asked him about his doctoral work. Yes, he'd slept with cannibals, no big deal. And did he have a name for his dissertion yet? 'Yeah,' he said, and shrugged - he actually shrugged. 'Why They Didn't Eat Me.' But now a Lexus wasn't sensible?"

It takes Phillips - better known as the author of "Prague" and "The Egyptologist" - nine paragraphs to drop the L-word. The follow-up chapters by Richard McCann and Curtis Sittenfeld, flooring it, get there in four. With the price of gas so high, can you blame them?

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