Don't You Want Me
India Knight Penguin, 272pp, £6.99
ISBN 0140297405
Our heroine, Stella, is in her late thirties, has a child but no husband, a lodger who is as horny as a goat, a sumptuous abode, and scant friends but a large number of pretty tops. Her parents were slightly unconventional and so, accordingly, was her early life. Her education was extensive enough for the odd classical reference, but not so extensive that she trusts her reader to know what she's on about. A list of her views could have come straight from a questionnaire in Just 17. Ginger-haired men are just howwid. Conceptual art is plain silly. Lesbians, huh? What is it they do in bed, exactly? Candida is a curious name for a girl, what with it also being the name of a vaginal fungus. And posh people say "Air hell-air", instead of "Oh, hello".
This is all stuff of such folkloric obviousness that I don't think I've ever seen it written down before, which might give this slender tome some kind of purpose as an object for a WI time capsule ("Dear people from the future - this is what we used to chunter on about! Honestly!"). Otherwise, everything proceeds exactly as you'd expect it to, from yet another book with a pink cover (apart from Cosmo's Over 100 Truly Astonishing Sex Tips, which has quite a different narrative, er, thrust).
The chick goes on a lot of dates, with a lot of silly men, but realises in the end that the one for her was just under her nose (I don't think I'm giving away the ending - there are quite a few men under this one's nose). This is all refreshingly unwhiny. Stella rarely, if ever, thinks that things are going wrong because of her own deficiencies, which is the standard mantra of this genre. Rather, everyone else is a complete tosser. The other really noticeable USP is the narratorial love of any joke featuring a poo or a fart, the first mention of which sounds like, well, a joke. Referring to some posh friend, Stella remarks: "she is particularly keen on young people . . . she brings them together every week for dinner and thrice a year for what she refers to as 'my big dos' (which always raises a snigger from me: I do love a poo joke)". But no, 150 pages on, she's still on about pooing and farting and "parpsters", in a manner so markedly un-chicklit that it just about lifts this into a genre all of its own.
The problem with Stella's world, from an outsider's point of view, is that it is peopled with creatures who do not act like humans: they act like bugbears made flesh. There's a mother who is opposed to shouting at children, and all she ever says is: "Don't shout at children." There is a randy neighbour who thinks single mothers are desperate, and all he ever says is: "You're a single mother - you must be desperate." Middle-class dinner parties proceed exactly as they do in adverts; playgroups likewise. There is nothing to suggest that this woman has lived in the world rather than, say, arrived here with a manual. Clearly, these characters are not meant to be realistic as such, but the portraits are too ham-fisted even for satire.
Besides, the excuse of satire won't hold for the least-achieved of the characters, a DJ in his forties, who refuses to dress like a grown-up and thinks he's Ali G. He says very little apart from "innit" and "respec" and "I is a top DJ". The author's intention is utterly opaque - is this supposed to be a caricature of a caricature? Shouldn't it be funnier than the original, or at least distinguishable? Even if it were, what purpose would it serve?
So the pickings are pretty slim if you're looking for a kaleidoscope of human experience, but this kind of thing exists only for its protagonist. I will also admit to a certain warmth around the heart area when things finally came out all right for Stella. Shortly after Knight's first book, My Life on a Plate, she gave an interview to Lynn Barber in which she said: "It's a really great way of earning money! You write the book, and that's quite fun, sitting at the computer in your pyjamas, honking. And then other countries buy it and film people come along and give you money and it is completely bliss." And that pretty much sums up our latest heroine - gushing, avaricious, faux-naive, unreflective, but not entirely without charm.
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