Guys and dole offices

Men in crisis? It looks like it's an epidemic. Maggie O'Farrell reviews first-time fiction from Matthew Klam, Jason Cowley and Harland Miller
  • The Observer,

Sam the Cat
Matthew Klam
Viking £10.99, pp243
Buy it at BOL

Unknown Pleasures
Jason Cowley
Faber £9,99, pp256
Buy it at BOL

Slow Down Arthur, Stick to Thirty
Harland Miller
Fourth Estate £9.99, pp255
Buy it at BOL

Masculinity is in crisis, or so we are always being told. If this month's crop of first-time fiction is anything to go by, the crisis is reaching epidemic proportions. Matthew Klam's Sam the Cat has been described as 'the boys' answer' to The Girls' Guide to Hunting and Fishing, and while it shares a similar salt-dried humour, it has little of the latter's levity and wry compassion.

In the title story, Sam's world is set off kilter when he learns that the 'silky, jet-black hair... [and] a high, tight athlete's ass' he can't stop staring at in a bar belong to a guy. Another man, at the point of opening his mouth to make a speech at his friend's wedding, realises that his old college buddy has deteriorated into a money-obsessed, pompous creep - and decides to share this sentiment with the assembled crowd. Vince is thrown into confusion when his brother asks him to be a sperm donor, but only for the reason that he fancies his sister-in-law.

Klam is dizzyingly honest about men: after a guy has a fight with his girlfriend in which she collides with a door, he confides that he 'wanted to take her somewhere private and apologise and fill her with my cement'. This is prose not so much muscular as ab-curled, squat-thrusted and bench-pressed. If this prose were a man you'd probably cross over the road to avoid him. Or at least I would.

This is not to say that I didn't like it, but that 'like' is perhaps the wrong word. Klam's writing is exact, clever and at times painfully accurate on male sexuality. It does what all good satire should - makes you wince with recognition as well as laugh out loud. But there is something disturbingly cloned about his female characters: they're all called Linda or Lynn or Denise or Diane. They all smell of shampoo. They're all gorgeous, but just that little bit tricksy, that little bit neurotic.

The only thing we get any sense of differentiation from is the descriptions of their butts: 'fine as silk' (that's Diane); 'a beautiful, round, heart-shaped ass - oh man!' (Denise); 'her peachy, scrumptious pillowy ass' (Phylida). I can't get away from the sneaking suspicion that this misogyny in the name of irony is just sexism through the back door.

Crisis number two comes to us courtesy of Jason Cowley's literary thriller, Unknown Pleasures. Joshua Winter returns to London from Canada to work in a law firm. Or so he tells his mother. He never turns up for work, and it's not long before he is trawling through microfiche files and medical records in search of his father, who disappeared 12 years previously.

This is a tale of masks, deceptions and slippery identities. Joshua is escaping the after-effects of a car crash and the death of two friends; and in the narrative which runs concurrent with Joshua's we learn that the father was running from much worse - dodgy deals, pornography, theft and murder.

At first it seems strange that Cowley chooses to entwine these narratives, straight away giving the reader the resolution to the plot. But you'll realise that the device of having more information that the protagonist is an ingenious one: instead of destroying the suspense, it heightens the anxiety. The closer the confused and unknowing Joshua gets to certain events and certain people, the more you want to shriek: 'No! Don't do that!'

Harland Miller's acknowledgements in Slow Down Arthur, Stick to Thirty are a rather entertaining role call for the Cool Britannia that has now gone distinctly tepid. This is my favourite: 'Michael Warren - I was 12 when I first sneaked into the De Grey Rooms to watch you play, it became a strange turning point.'

Unfortunately, the novel itself didn't have quite the same pull, mostly because nothing whatsoever happens in it. It follows the meanderings of the slightly unhinged mind of a teenager in York (or 'Eboracum', its Roman name, as he insists on calling it) who is obsessed with a man called Ziggy who is in turn obsessed with David Bowie.

The problem is that adolescence is, basically, boring, and Miller doesn't stoop to livening it up for us. We wander from café to pub to dole office to tea at home to friend's flat to café to pub... you get the picture. He makes us relive the tedium of teen just that little bit too vividly. We've all been there. We've all endured its endless, mind-destroying monotony. And we don't particularly want to go there again, thanks very much.

Today's best video

Today in pictures