LIFE STORY:THIS IS NOT a long book, but the author is so generous with the first-person pronoun that it is only a few pages before the reader feels cornered and is reminded of the old gag:
"But that's enough of me going on about myself. What do you think of me?" It is true that Bits of Me Are Falling Apart is a kind of autobiography, but there are ways of reflecting on your life without excluding the rest of the world. And it is true that a neurotic protagonist is in itself no bar to a good book (cf Dostoevsky, Kafka, to go no further). But we need a good reason to invest in a new neurosis, as presented here.
The principle neurosis affecting William Leith is a classic one, the passing of time. Life is moving on without him; as in the Pink Floyd song, Time, he has missed the starting gun. When he first heard the song at the age of 16, he thought: "I'll never miss the starting gun. I'll hear it loud and clear. Bang! How sad and pathetic, to miss the starting gun."
But now he is 47, and still waiting for the bang, and bits of him are falling apart - not just in the cosmic sense but medically too.
Health is the other big neurosis: the prostate, the teeth, the skin, the hair, the weight, the worries that he might have cancer, related or not to an over-indulgence in food, drink, sex, smokes and drugs. (Where did it all go wrong?) And in spite of all, there is the fond hope that he might be reunited with the mother of his three-year-old son. Join in the therapy.
Readers of the Independent on Sunday became aware of Leith in the early 1990s. He was one of a new breed of newspaper columnists, who, rather than declaiming from some notional position of authority, wrote about themselves. Sometimes they poked fun, in an ironic way, at the very idea of writing a column. They were usually funny and often scandalous.
But everybody is at it now; opinion is not what it used to be and the novelty of the confessional has worn off. When Leith confides that "in 1999 I was in a bad state. I was shitting blood, if you want to know the truth", a sane reaction is: "No, I don't want to know the truth, let me out of here." On a similar note, you might avert your eyes from the episode of crab lice on page 112. And then there is the languid affectation, as when he discusses the Dutch explorer who named the Easter Islands: "Amstelveen - that's not his name but you know who I mean." (No, I didn't actually, until I looked it up in the encyclopedia, which took two minutes.) But it is when the outside world breaks in - even if it is only for the author to consider whether it is the world that is falling apart, not just him - that the book improves. Leith writes well, with an original view of things, and his discursive style wanders at will.
There is good stuff on the banking system and economic growth (a touch of Ezra Pound paranoia), on the stoicism of both Admiral Nelson ("he was everything I was not") and the Tom Hanks character in Saving Private Ryan, on how the body works, on death and movies, on books about middle-aged losers, on the nature of happiness and love. He is funny about how to get on a train to visit his girlfriend without a ticket because he has literally no money; about almost going up to shake hands with Ronald Reagan in a Beverly Hills restaurant; about arriving at James Dyson's house for an interview, bearing his Dyson vacuum cleaner for the inventor to fix. Just leave "me" out of it.
John S Doyle is a freelance journalist
Bits of Me Are Falling Apart By William Leith Bloomsbury, 200pp. £10.99