FICTON: This Bleeding CityBy Alex Preston Faber Faber, 335pp. £12.99

ALEX PRESTON'S overcooked debut novel, This Bleeding City, comes at you like a cross between Jules and Jimand The Bonfire of the Vanities, but lacks both the forgiving intelligence of Truffaut and the satirical venom of Tom Wolfe. Preston, according to his author's bio, was born in 1979 and "works in finance". It is disappointing to find that one of the first novels to tackle the global financial crisis from the inside is so muddled and full of cliches.

Preston’s narrator is Charlie Wales, the son of “desperately bourgeois” parents. Charlie wants to be a journalist, but instead gets a job at an investment banking firm, where his boss says things like: “It’s not a question of which Porsche but how many, got it?”

Charlie wants to be rich. He also wants to lead a fulfilling life. Naturally, and inevitably, he finds that the two cannot be reconciled. (Incidentally, there is no reason why one cannot be both happy and a rich investment banker, but by the rules of the ambitious first novel, Charlie, with his cultural aspirations, knows there must be more to life than money.)

Henry and Vero, Charlie’s thinly sketched housemates, are similarly dissatisfied with City life. They don’t want to track the price of oil or sell securitised debt. They want to do authentic, meaningful things, like perform pro bono open-heart surgery on sub-Saharan refugees, or possibly write reviews for “a highbrow theatrical website” (as opposed, presumably, to a lowbrow theatrical website).

Vero is French, and is therefore allowed to do wacky things like drop champagne glasses off hotel balconies, and to get away with saying "I feel so empty" as she quaffs Cristal in an expensive nightclub. But This Bleeding Citydisplays no real feeling for the pathos and comedy of true decadence – for that, you'll have to go to Balzac, or Martin Amis, novelists who understand the subtle, often invisible ways in which money and greed really can corrupt the spirit.

The world-weariness of Preston’s characters is a pose, an affectation. Charlie Wales is disillusioned with his banking job before he begins it; his dreams of wealth are vague – childish fantasies, in effect – and never cohere into a valid motive for his striving. If Charlie hates being an investment banker so much, the reader keeps asking, then why the hell doesn’t he just do something else? But an investment banker is what he is, a Master of the Universe, and it is Charlie’s universe that is the material of the book.

Alas, this novel has no real interest in anatomising from a fresh perspective the failings of the global financial system. The little homilies about credit default swaps and the like feel tacked-on, irrelevant. The sinister, hysterical nature of the world money markets has been made abundantly clear to everyone over the past 18 months – but Preston’s novel is too focused on Charlie’s drab interiority to pay much attention to the real problems of the world he and his friends inhabit.

It’s fatal for a novelist (and, one might add, for the rest of us) to take these people at their own valuation. Investment bankers – those conceited bagmen with delusions of world-

historical potency – are, or should be, a standing joke. But Preston’s novel is too busy being po-faced to find time for the real, bitter comedy that could be written about the Great Recession’s engineers.

This Bleeding Citymay look like a novel about investment bankers, but it's actually a 335-page meditation on the question of why being young, well off and western, and a Master of the Universe to boot, doesn't automatically make you happy – a question, surely, that only a well-off young westerner would even think to ask.

Kevin Power is the author of Bad Day in Blackrock(Lilliput) and the recipient of the 2009 Rooney Prize for Irish Literature