FICTION: The Book Against God is the first novel by James Wood, now resident in Washington, DC, but in the early 1990s familiar as a rather acerbic chief literary critic on the Guardian.
So this book is something of a hostage to fortune: a possible occasion for harshly reviewed authors to exact revenge.
By and large, the book survives the risk. It is the narrative of Thomas Bunting, a graduate student of philosophy who is failing to write his doctoral thesis (is such a shortcoming imaginable?), distracted by the writing of this angry and increasingly desperate "book against God". The struggle is Oedipal, centring on an argument with Thomas's father, a genial and - supposedly - sympathetic Church of England vicar from Durham. The narrator's name is significant: Thomas, no doubt, because he is doubting, and Bunting maybe to recall the nursery-rhyme: Daddy's gone a-hunting for a rabbitskin to wrap his baby bunting in. Thomas is trying without much success to escape the constrictions of this parental skin.
As is to be hoped from a chief literary critic, there are some grander allusions. Some of them are explicit, like Kierkegaard's aphorism which gives the book its title: "Against God we are always in the wrong". Dostoevsky is mentioned; the Dostoevsky novel that most links with this narrator is The Idiot, whose anti-heroic protagonist is similarly unpleasant and disruptive but, in the end, not necessarily in the wrong. Golding's Free Fall also seems to hover in the background; and the inconclusive, obsessive recurrence of Philosophy in the novel recalls one of the great modern comic masterpieces, Kennedy Toole's A Confederacy of Dunces.
This is impressive competition, and it is no disgrace to say that this book doesn't quite live with it. It certainly makes a fine start, about the compulsiveness of lying - at once hilarious and haunting. But it seems like the beginning of a different, more laddish book: Nick Hornby rather than Dostoevsky.
Other problems about this as a partially comic novel soon emerge: apart from the narrator, the characters don't come to life. Jane, the narrator's estranged ("escaped" might be a better word) concert-pianist wife, is too good to be true, despite her rather staged rudeness to waiters. Max, the Thatcherite-convert, is no more credibly evoked than his blue-stocking parents. The lesser, yokel-ish characters are wooden, endlessly repeating but never transcending their post-Dickensian catch-phrases: "the part of it" for "the point of it", or "don't start me on x".
More damagingly, the saintly, sweet-tempered vicar father is a pain in the neck who would drive anyone away from his God. How do we know this is not the intended response? Because the blurb says it's not: a Chaucerian parish priest, the father is "a brilliant and formidable Christian example".
I suppose that could just about be equated with "pain in the neck"; but the blurb also loses credibility by telling us that Thomas Bunting, "a chronic liar as well as an atheist" (that much is true), is "charming". That quality has got lost in the telling.
Of course there is some unreliable narrating going on; when in the contemporary novel is there not! But surely the unreliability does not extend to the blurb? As well as unreliable narration, there is the inevitable modern-novel structural cliché: the narrative told out of sequence, which seems a pointless departure here. (In this the prototype is Tartt's The Secret History: a novel also, oddly, evoked by Max.)
My more serious problem by the end was that, though I didn't find him charming (he stinks and hangs around in his pyjamas all day: the post-Donleavy protagonist as shambles), I sympathised with Thomas Bunting more than any of the other rather central-casting characters. As with The Idiot, the crisis comes with the abandonment of lies for the truth; both lead to disaster - the book's more serious moral after it has turned its back on the comic.
The greatest virtue of The Book Against God is that it keeps your attention in every sentence. If the reader's final assessment is "could do better", that is not only a reservation. It is acknowledging a wit and fictional drive which may well go on to greater successes, given a better cast and better influences to be anxious about.
The Book Against God
By James Wood
Jonathan Cape, 256 pp. £12.99
• Bernard O'Donoghue latest volume of poems, Outliving, has just been published by Chatto & Windus