Byron Easy

Can you handle 500 pages of clever complaining? How about if the narrator is a British minor poet, likely drunk, and on a train back to his mother's house with all his worldly possessions? He mostly wants to tell us how awful his wife, Mandy, was and is. Even if you have patience with young men complaining about women, the overexcited vocabulary here can get tiresome: "There were bookshelves of erudite criticism, Expressionist prints on the walls, scripts cracked open on stolen university armchairs, racks of fine wine, the Telegraph crossword done as a flat on a Sunday morning, and (the really impressive thing) real Sumatran filter coffee." The childhood remembrances are a bit easier. Cumulatively, however, there's a tonal difference in the novel that makes it fall short of both the winning charm of Nick Hornby's High Fidelity and the grotesque lovesickness of a Humbert Humbert.