Book review / Amis is as good as a smile

Stuff by Joseph Connolly, Faber, pounds 14.99

It always takes more effort to get something started than to keep it moving, whether it's a novel or a wheelbarrow. But Joseph Connolly tries a fraction too hard with the opening of Stuff: "Emily hit Kevin with a coffee table - just upped and did it. And was she now content with leaving the man writhing around on the ground (his eyes quite dulled yet lit with surprise, all overlaid with a thick and dripping, big brown slice of fear)?"

There is no telling what Connolly means by this. In what conceivable sense does fear correspond to fried bread or anything else that comes in dripping slices, brown or otherwise? A further slight problem is that we soon learn that Emily, an interior designer, keeps all her tables covered in knick-knacks whose disarrangement she cannot tolerate. So she wouldn't swing the coffee table at her husband even if she had the strength which, not being a giantess, she clearly can't have. Perhaps we should allow it as comic exaggeration.

Connolly's style sorts itself out after that. Stuff is his third comic novel in as many years and he is becoming highly accomplished. The black farce of the storyline recalls Tom Sharpe, the indignant narration recalls Kingsley Amis. In fact, Connolly reproduces some of Amis's favourite mannerisms more or less exactly.

Raymond, whose son is going out with Kevin and Emily's daughter, drops by. "Kevin had gone to the lavatory, now. He had actually said, much to Raymond's wondering disbelief, that the time had come for a man to do what a man had to do. No arch or roguish smile, no John Wayne accent, not even the merest trace of an incipient inverted comma: just said it - said it as if no one in the world had ever said it before."

This unblushing indulgence in stereotypical behaviour is a key trait of the characters Amis labelled "stooges". The difference is that Amis would probably have gone for the John Wayne accent to pile on the annoyance. He hated his stooges, whereas poor old useless Kevin is, oddly enough, quite a sympathetic character.

But the annoyance soon builds up all right. Emily's decor starts it off. Raymond seethes at the swagged curtains, the table lamps "made from ginger jars that had never seen ginger, matey", the dummy obelisk and the bowl of silver-wrapped dragees you mustn't eat. Amis always liked using pretentious and fiddly ornaments of costume or furnishing to get his characters and readers into a lather of helpless fury.

By the time Raymond's son and Emily's daughter appear, giggling at nothing in a deeply irritating way while Kevin utters non-sequiturs and Emily "acid-sweetly" threatens more domestic violence, Raymond is approaching true Amisian apoplexy. He "just turned away before all the blood in his body coursed up into his neck and blasted right out of his nostrils". Raymond even thinks, "If I had a Bren gun handy ... " In similar vein, Kevin later thinks of his wife as "Obergruppenfuhrer Emily". Amis was inordinately fond of these old-time military allusions, but Raymond and Kevin, still in their forties, are a bit too young for them. And Raymond's comment on women ("I mean, what - maybe they're all born a bit doolally and as the years progress - through periods of instability and paranoia they all end up as terminally deranged") comes of obvious ancestry.

Imitative as it is, the book has enough energy to take on a life of its own and is often laugh-out-loud funny. Kevin's mortal terror of everyday situations, like talking to people or going into restaurants, is very well handled. The phrasemaking is apt and unshowy. The Sharpe-ish plot, a calculatedly absurd round of adultery, murder, insanity, businesses going bust and houses burning down, creates an exhilarating hysteria. Although, at 330 pages, it goes on too long, Stuff is better than Sharpe's own current work, and maybe better than Amis's final novels too.

There is a useful core of seriousness to the whole thing. The kids' incessant giggling, for instance, turns out to be for a reason quite opposite to the sexual smugness you first assume: a problem they won't discuss has left them permanently embarrassed with each other. Many of the characters who start off as caricatures or monsters acquire unexpected depth, while the ones who appear most normal to begin with sometimes prove to be howling nutters - but this never falls into a predictable pattern, so the story keeps its edge, its heightened atmosphere and its weird conviction.