Nick Hornby has the ability to write about clichΘd situations, or even write clichΘs themselves, and make them sound fresh and original - the neurosis of the solitary sports fan, the romantic misreads between men and women. In this, his latest novel, Katie Carr, a doctor and a smart, liberal Londoner, finds herself in a Leeds car-park and about to drift into a possible affair because her husband, David, a struggling and bitter novelist, is just so awful and unloving - "The Angriest Man in Holloway" is the title of his local newspaper column.
It is a promising start and Hornby pitches Katie's voice intriguingly: impatient, questing, confused. Much has been made lately of whether male novelists can evercatch a woman's voice properly, but this is a curious debate - we're dealing with fiction after all, and with imagination. Incidentally, the reverse practice is rarely questioned and female authors quite happily, and successfully, recreate boxers, soldiers and the Duke of Wellington. (And let's assume that Annie Proulx didn't have a past life as a 19th-century cowboy to draw on.)
Katie and David, who have two kids, try to confront the festering soup that is their marriage, but it seems almost impossible. "It takes years of miserable ingenuity" to get to where they are, a place where years of hurting and being hurt mean that "every word you utter or hear becomes coded and loaded, as complicated and full of subtext as a bleak and brilliant play".
However, in the style of such a play, and β la Harold Pinter, a vaguely sketched stranger soon arrives. He is the appropriately named Dr GoodNews, a neighbourhood healer who "cures" ailments in a manner not fully explained. From here on, there is a serious fall-off in the story, a decline which is not only disappointing but astonishing, and even at times inexplicable, given Hornby's hitherto high achievements with Fever Pitch and High Fidelity. After an encounter with GoodNews, David changes utterly and, in a manner which strains all credulity, he not only becomes attentive towards his wife but suddenly wants to mend all of the world's ills, beginning with getting his neighbours to take in homeless people.
Katie is amazed and, in a theme which is only thinly sketched, she is forced to question what exactly goodness is. How can she, a doctor, be good to people and yet not be good, by having an illicit affair? This question is explored in the flattest and most nebulous of ways. As well as the creaky storyline, the book also suffers from its author's desire which results in an irritating trivialisation of issues such as poverty and homelessness. The frequent references to contemporary atrocities are made with the same weary insouciance as those to the pop songs and TV personalities with which Hornby likes to litter his novels. (And which already seem dated. Buzz Lightyear? Buzz Last-year, surely.)
Nor is the story saved by Hornby's normally sharp humour. David becomes so reformed that consideration is given (ho-ho) to changing the name of his column to "The Second Angriest Man in Holloway". "But that would look a bit flat on the page," says Katie, in a phrase that could sum up the entire novel.
"He should write for England," reads a dust-jacket blurb, dating from the author's halcyon Fever Pitch days. No doubt Hornby will write good books again, or even brilliant ones, but on the basis of this slim effort, he's be lucky to come off the subs' bench for Cosmo.
Eamon Delaney is a novelist and journalist. His latest book, An Accidental Diplomat, is published on Monday