When solutions are too easy

The dust jacket puff tells us that Gary Langford’s new novel is “in the richly bizarre vein of John Irvine”. For some this will be a less than enticing recommendation. But Vanities is a less sentimental book than Irvine could have written. Irvine’s humour is the measure of his characters’ untrammeled imaginativeness in an otherwise pedestrian world, a measure this reader finds fatuous. While Langford does have a tendency towards Irvine’s brand of brittle whimsy, his characters’ wit is a dissembling, defensive style, an indication of their vulnerability. He is determined to indulge neither his characters nor his readers with whimsicality.

Vanities, though, suffers from a different kind of sentimentality. It canvasses a wide range of topical social issues as representative of the spirit of the age. Langford believes, in a vague, unspecific way, that these determine individual and family life, a belief that encourages, on the one hand, a facile cynicism, and on the other, a sentimental faith in the therapeutic value of truth-telling: