Ambient Parking Lot chronicles the triumphs (rare) and mishaps (frequent) of an ensemble of experimental sound artists. Blurbed as “part fiction, part earnest mockumentary,” the book is first a comedy of manners, that brand of satire aimed at taking down the pretentions of a particular social group. In this case, Pamela Lu targets art movements of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, gleefully eviscerating avant-garde pieties, cherished literary truths, and pop-cultural bromides alike. And yet, despite these satirical hijinks, Ambient Parking Lot ultimately raises questions that might apply more broadly to those of us who enjoy taking our news and our humor in one fell Colbertian swoop.

Speaking as a manic chorus, the Ambient Parkers zip from one artistic stance to the next, all the while recording album after ambient album in parking lots:

The economy collapsed and our theory was discarded in favor of an aesthetic of banal scarcity. Secular pragmatism replaced the faith-based work ethic, which had once led to the lush arpeggios of grocery bags being loaded into single-driver vehicles and trunk lids thumping to a close in the late afternoon sunlight.

Ambient Parking Lot might have remained here, a witty parlor-room drama for the experimental art set, but Lu ups the stakes early on by forcing the pressures of our moment into the Parkers’ aesthetic end zone. “One day, without warning, terrorists attacked several government buildings, including the DMV,” the Parkers report. “The injuries we witnessed there illustrated just how easily the luxury zone of the parking lot could be extended to slaughter.” Though Lu does not say so explicitly, the attack clearly conjures 9/11: “Over the next eighteen months, we were flooded with media images showing the impact of retaliatory airstrikes and a coordinated ground campaign on so-called enemy soil.”

For all their theorizing, the Parkers aren’t equipped to respond to the attacks or to the retaliations. But this doesn’t stop them from trying. They quickly organize a troupe of dancers to “stage Butoh-inflected body movements simulating the trauma of violence” in (of course) a parking lot, while audiotapes play ambient sounds of convoy trucks. Everything is almost par for the course until one of the dancers takes the show further than planned, executing a twelve-hour performance from within the wreckage of a car. The performance shakes onlookers and participants alike, as if they have “witnessed—in the cosmic space of time between the onslaught...