It's a modern French comedy of manners, only without the manners...

Agnès Desarthe exposes the grotesque realities of modern urban life in her controversial novel, Good Intentions

Good Intentions
Agnès Desarthe
translated by Adriana Hunter
Flamingo £9.99, pp128

'Becoming a home-owner is not without its disadvantages. There are the mortgage payments, the pre-war wiring, the hit-and-miss plumbing. It was not until the joint-ownership meeting that I realised the full extent of the malediction.'

The narrator of Agnès Desarthe's novel is a skittish, highly imaginative woman; a natural hysteric given to dramatic statements and poetic digressions. When Sonia and her partner move into their new apartment they are invited to take part in the stultifying discussions between the co-owners.

Typically, as the novel's title implies, the couple accede. Yet 'these meetings were not compulsory, and it would seem an exaggeration to compare an optional form of torture to unavoidable concerns. Where I am concerned, this sort of logic does not, however, apply.'

Their first meeting appals her. In two hours they have reached only the second point on the agenda. Faced with neighbours who are, without exception, in their dotage, she declares they have moved into 'a hospice'. Later, exhausted by their pedantry, she amends this further: they have moved into 'a hospice and a lunatic asylum'.

In writing of the aged, motley crew of neighbours, Sonia is unfailingly funny. The owners' meeting allows her to cast a wholly female eye over the group and indulge her descriptive powers in crisply unkind portraits that are no less telling for their brevity.

There is Monsieur and Madame Petronie: 'He hasn't crossed his knees. He can't because he's not quite normal. I can't think of another way of saying it' so laden is he with tics and grimaces; and Madame, who has inexplicably married him 'in spite of everything; I imagine her 40 years earlier. She would have been pretty but marked by the ladleful of boiling contrition poured over her youthful head.' Then there is Monsieur Moldo, the dictatorial leader of the group, who begins each of his sentences with 'Listen...', 'and you know straight away that you have lost'.

Sonia is a charming, artless narrator whose digressions border on the confessional. But the author's wit holds a serious intent. Desarthe blends the abstract and the specific, the worldly with the domestic, as Sonia describes the changing neighbourhood and the poverty and the racism endemic to it. With broad, impressionistic gestures she tells of a cultural unease and recounts snatches of overheard racism before swooping back into the intimacy of the particular which, for Sonia herself - a well-meaning, frequently disappointed idealist - holds its own problems.

Of the building's elderly inhabitants, there is one who is fragile, febrile and needy, and who has latched on to the young woman with parasitical determination. Monsieur Dupotier calls at Sonia's flat several times a day, confused, desperate, pleading for a snack and seemingly unable to venture out himself since the deaths, in rapid succession, of his dog, wife and son. Still, Desarthe's sly humour peeps through. Sonia is torn between guilt at her irritation with the old man and her constant urge to do right. Taking him back to his flat, she is hit by the stench of decay: 'It wouldn't be exaggerating to talk of suffocation,' she ponders. 'I thought that this, this smell, could be what had killed them one after the other.'

The narrator suffers from a disease particular to the middle classes - that of a pervasive guilt which results in an inability easily to judge anyone. She is reduced to drawing up a list with a 'vertical horizon', on either side of which she places the names of the Good and the Bad. The former, not coincidentally, sit on the left. Firmly placed on the right, however, are Simone and Simono, the caretakers whose heavy-handed treatment of Dupotier incenses her. Sonia, a 'champion of extenuating circumstances', can think of no reason that would justify Simono's increasing brutality towards the old man, or his veiled anti-Semitism towards her.

Desarthe's skill is to balance the sheer, pedestrian horror of the situation with her teasing, gleeful humour. The caretakers are almost Dickensian in their physical grotesqueness. He is all sagging breasts and oily hair; she is all gorgeous cleavage and missing teeth. The novel, whose class and culture-laden subject matter caused controversy in its native France, is a microcosm of modern city life. Neither hectoring nor mundane, it is abruptly, sharply realistic, and perfectly tempered by the innocent, increasingly doomed optimism of its narrator.