It used to be joked, a few years ago, that there were too many emerging Young Irish Writers. How things have changed. In the last while, very few new voices have emerged. This first novel, by Monaghan-born author Damien Owens, is heralded as a "very funny and sparkling debut by someone who is here to stay". But the reader's heart sinks with the opening scene; a bunch of lads in a pub talking about effective chat-up lines with women. One of them, Norm, has had great success because when he told a girl "I fancy the hole off you" she thought he said "I fancy the whole of you". However, this scintillating banter is interrupted by an attack from a nearby girl called Catherine, also known as "The Girl With the Ass". The whole scene is like a bad beer commercial or Ibiza Uncovered, but without the wit.
The book gets better thereafter, but not a whole lot better. Our young hero, Joe Flood, works for a PR agency which handles a company, Langley, that is about to close. And guess who works at Langley? Yes, Catherine, "The Girl with the Ass" who now becomes "The Girl with the Tits". Joe actually fancies her, but can he tell her about the impending doom for her company? The other very thin strand of the novel is Joe's encounters with his country-dwelling family, where his sister Deirdre has become pregnant by local lad Brendan Feeny.
In fairness these sequences are a bit better and offer some psychological depth. Indeed, Joe's mother and sister are pretty much the only women who are not either "bitches" and "madwomen" or "babes" and "complete and utter rides". The book reads quickly, which is a tribute to the author's fluid use of dialogue (Owens has worked as a copywriter) or to the fact that there is absolutely nothing to detain the eye. There are some good lines, like a PR man called Stuart who brings Communications students around his company because "he wants to give something back". But there is also stuff like, a nun is "a grown woman who not only believes in Santa Claus, but wants to be an elf", or the humourless girl who lacks "a sense of humour the way Stevie Wonder lacks a sense of vision". Reading which, I felt as amused as Ray Charles. We even have a family described as like the "Waltons on E", that lazy old chesnut - along with anything "on acid" - I thought had been banned by the linguistic drugs squad.
These are times of momentous social change in Irish life, and yet one has to admit that our contemporary writing scene is in something of a crisis in terms of recording any of it, especially on a humorous level. But it is in perhaps a worse state than we thought. And yet British publishers have their chequebooks flapping for anything that is marketable as "modern", "young" and "Irish". This is one of two books for which Damien Owens has reportedly secured a six-figure advance. On this basis, retrospective millions should be handed out to all those poor devils who wrote novels back in the 1970s and hungry 1980s, before fashion and television corroded things. Perhaps the starving garret was not a bad crucible for talent, after all.
Eamon Delaney is a critic and novelist