The Mushy Memoir seems to have become something of a literary institution. Every season's list has one, its opening sentence more depressing than a wet Wednesday: "Those of us who didn't die in childbirth/contract smallpox/starve in infancy grew up in a permanently flooded scullery/roofless rural hovel/termite-infested attic somewhere west/south/east of the poverty line..."
But things will never be the same in the memoir department again, because Bruno Maddox has blown the genre out of the water with this mercilessly sassy satire whose gimlet-eyed opening sentence - "Like a lot of little girls back then in that part of the world I viewed the future with a certain lack of enthusiasm, though for a different set of reasons than the rest of them." - sets out its stall with a resounding "thwack".
It would be a cruel reviewer indeed who would give away Maddox's lithe, clever storyline (in fact, if the book has a flaw, it may be that it's a mite too clever to be totally un-irritating) - but it won't give anything away to reveal that, along with the Mushy Memoir, Maddox targets a) the rural idyll; b) the urban nightmare; c) the look-back-at-the-20th-century millennium fad; d) the 1960s; e) the self-help phenomenon; f) the themed bar craze and g) the Bright Young Things of contemporary fiction writing and that he hits his target every time.
And then there's that knowing humour, that coy, self-regarding tone, which never falters, but produces some delightful moments. When one of the central characters (cunningly named Bruno Maddox) is flicking through the New Fiction section in a New York bookstore, he comes across the sentence "They ate as they had drunk: as if compelled." The sentence having been reproduced in bold type, Call me shallow: but, reader, I laughed. On the evidence of this debut novel, Bruno Maddox is on the verge of Bright Young Thingdom - if not already way over the edge.
Arminta Wallace is an Irish Times journalist
