Fiction: In her new novel, Eleanor Bailey, through the story of the relationship between two artist brothers, tells the story of post-Wall Berlin in suitably post-modern style with, among other things, talking art installations and a translation of a memoir within the novel, which turns out to be a novel within the novel.
It's an ambitious undertaking and for the most part Bailey - one of 21 women tipped by the Orange Futures promotion as writers to watch in the 21st century - pulls it off. Her first book, Idioglossia, was, by all accounts, complex and clever and this is too - a sophisticated story about fashionably alienated Bohemians. Present-day Berlin may not have the nihilistic cachet of its punk heyday in the early 1980s when Bowie, Lou Reed and Nick Cave lived there, but its history still imbues its inhabitants with a special world-weary decadence, now mixed with common-or-garden consumerist ennui.
It takes a while to win you over. Two chapters in, I briefly wondered if ploughing through another 300 pages of sharply observed existential angst might just take up too big a fraction of my lifetime, but Bailey's adeptness at interweaving her stories and themes and her brilliance with narrative devices kept me reading and overall I was glad, despite my reservations about the author's detachment from her characters, a lack of sentiment which verges on coldness.
At the centre of the novel are the two middle-aged brothers. Erich is a counter-culture type who runs a failing café and art gallery in Berlin and is floundering in the new globalised consumerised city. Berlin's new spirit, ironically, is encapsulated in his daughter, a media-savvy conceptual artist who, Tracey Emin-style, exploits her own body and personal life in her "work". Max, his younger, better-looking, more "successful" photographer brother has spent his adult life in London but returns to Berlin following a failed suicide attempt. The myths about Berlin and the family myths about Erich and Max are intertwined. They struggle to come to terms with themselves, each other and the city.
At times Bailey's eye for cultural detail seems to fail her - Brad Pitt is not known for playing villains, and it seems unlikely that Erich and his friends would have worn anti- Vietnam war buttons in the early 1980s - and I doubt any eight-year-old is quite as precocious as Erich's son Otto. But it's good to read a young writer who has the bottle to take on big themes - the legacy of history, the corporatisation of life and of art, the damage done in families - and the imagination and skill to deal with them. Despite a dearth of likeable characters, you can't help but be impressed by Marlene Dietrich Lived Here, its bleak intelligence, its contemporary punch.
Cathy Dillon is a journalist and critic
Marlene Dietrich Lived Here. By Eleanor Bailey. Doubleday, 330pp.
£16.99 sterling