Satire: Ross O'Carroll-Kelly is in his early 20s. He is an affluent and ignorant Foxrock-dwelling rugby-lover. He wears chinos, and his collars up. When the laundry piles up he goes shopping at BT2. He is a prodigious drinker and a successful ladies' man, writes Aengus Collins.
Ross is the fictional alter ego of author Paul Howard, and Frappuccino Years is the third book to spin off from his regular Sunday newspaper column. In one sense, Ross is an inspired creation. Observing the foibles of the opinionated and privileged is a tried and trusted formula, and the segment of young Dublin society that Ross represents, albeit in grotesque exaggeration, provides rich pickings for the satirist. It is perhaps curious that a Ross figure has taken so long to emerge. The demand has certainly been there, if sales of the books in this series are anything to go by. Evidently there are many young people enjoying the experience of having their social lives given literary form. This is something to be welcomed.
And yet one's overwhelming feeling while reading this book is one of disappointment. Ross is a character with considerable comic potential, but regrettably little of this potential is realised here. One of the problems is that Ross is a fool living amidst like-minded fools. Too much of the reader's time is spent in the restricted company of Ross's largely identikit friends and acquaintances. All too often, there is no-one to act as a foil to his rich tapestry of idiocies and prejudices, and consequently what could and should be extremely funny is frequently uninteresting, like eavesdropping on a conversation among dullards.
For a stereotype like Ross to work, he needs to be harried and unsteadied. One possible source of such tension is another stereotype, drawn from the other end of the human spectrum. For Ross, that means a Northsider. It's a pity that more isn't made of this, because the book comes alive during a number of its frequent forays across Dublin's social divide. An early episode involving a trip to The Square ("Pram Springs, Tallafornia") is one of the book's highlights. ("I'm like 'Oh the poverty, the squalor. It's inhuman,' and Ryle goes, 'Ross, this is Terenure. We haven't got there yet.'")
But this early promise is only infrequently delivered upon. Rather than work either to find the subtle laughs or to build the big laughs, the book's general tendency is to plump for the easiest laugh going.
There are other problems, the most significant of which is the absence of any plotting worth mentioning. Doubtless this stems from the book's origins in a newspaper column. But column or no column, a book really ought to have a beginning, a middle and an end, or a good reason for proceeding differently. As it stands, Frappuccino Years is essentially a series of vignettes and anecdotes, many of which are funny, but all of which suffer from being only loosely tacked on to a number of underdeveloped story arcs. There is little to pull the story forward, and the telescoping of Ross's emotional development, such as there is of it, into the final four pages of the book is simply lazy.
In making these criticisms, I want to resist taking Frappuccino Years too seriously. It is, after all, intended as an easy read, some light entertainment revolving around a group of urban twentysomethings. But light entertainment with a demographic like that is serious business these days, and the book cannot avoid inviting comparison with the staples of TV popular culture to which it repeatedly refers, such as Friends, Dawson's Creek, Sex And The City and Ally McBeal. If people who would otherwise be watching TV are encouraged to read by this book, then on one level it has been a heartwarming success. But the bottom line is that those television series, for all their fluffiness, are extremely well-crafted. Far more so than this book.
Aengus Collins is a writer and critic
The Orange Mocha-Chip Frappuccino Years. By Ross O'Carroll Kelly (as told to Paul Howard), The O'Brien Press, 206pp. €9.95