Irish Fiction: Chris Binchy's début novel was hailed as an up-to-the-minute X-ray of the zeitgeist, with its out-of-control "toxic bachelor" (Helen Fielding's phrase) serving as emblem of a crumbling Celtic Tiger.
While rather shortchanging its other characters, what The Very Man had going for it was its portrait of a man in crisis.
In his new novel, People Like Us, Binchy moves beyond what he has already become identified with in several important ways.
The move is at one level literal, with his latest novel extending into the suburbs, the new housing developments towards the west of Dublin.
Binchy's protagonist, Paul Walsh, undergoes something approaching trauma in relocating away from the familiar world of the southside and its reassuring sense that he is surrounded by "people like us".
Instead, with a growing family, he and his wife move to a new housing estate, one that boasts a town centre even though there is no town. But, as this makes clear, Binchy has also moved from a 30-year-old male protagonist to the more complex emotional reality of a man in his early 40s with a wife and three children.
The novel is astute and knowing in its portrayal of family life, of the compromises involved when there are five rather than one or two people to consider, and of the extreme uncertainty nowadays regulating exchanges between parents and children.
The father-daughter relationship assumes greater centrality as the teenage Clare comes into contact with the boys on the estate. His daughter's increasingly defiant moving beyond his paternal control arouses Paul's concern but also his anger, and precipitates the novel's major crisis.
Where The Very Man focused exclusively on Rory Brennan, here three disparate narrative strands are knotted together. Before the Walsh family even arrives on the estate, 15-year-old Robbie and his three mates have broken into their empty house, smoked dope and drunk beer. Robbie's narrative provides a challenging perspective to the middle-class existence of the Walshes and is in a different language from their overly fluent articulation.
The third strand concerns Joe Mitchell, the damaged man who lives alone on the estate and draws their scapegoating tendencies: think Tim Robbins in the movie Mystic River. Joe's inner narrative never quite convinces and it might have been better to have left him as an awkward, intruding outsider.
The novel deftly suggests that Paul and Robbie are not as different from Joe as they might like to think; all three increasingly perceive themselves as misfits.
People Like Us is driven by the sense of something awful about to happen, made all the more unsettling because the violence could come from more than one source.
At that level, it reads as compellingly as a thriller. But Binchy is also conveying a serious novel of Dublin in the here and now, of families and individuals trying to lead a good life in a world from which more and more of the familiar markers have been removed. It confirms his distinctive ability to excavate the paranoia lurking beneath the surface of everyday life, and significantly extends his range.
• Anthony Roche is a Senior Lecturer in the School of English at University College Dublin