The Year of the Jouncer Simon Gray Granta Books, 282pp, £14.99 ISBN 1862078963

He's back. Simon Gray, the angry old playwright who two years ago published The Smoking Diaries, is among us once more, dispensing his customary mixture of bile and the blues. "It is easy to fly into a passion," said Aristotle. "Anybody can do that - but to be angry with the right person to the right extent and at the right time and with the right object and in the right way - that is not easy, and it is not everyone who can do it."

No, indeed. But like Ben Butley, the depressed dyspeptic don at the centre of the play that will surely come to be seen as his masterpiece, Gray has a genius for fury.

In this memoir-cum-diary-cum-critique of the contemporary, everything from the sight of English youth to the squeak of his new moccasin-style shoes gets Gray's goat. Why, you keep wondering, did Granta not insist on cashing in on its predecessor's success and call The Year of the Jouncer "The Fuming Diaries"?

Jouncer sounds like a term from Gray's beloved cricket. In fact, it was the name his parents gave him as a baby because of his habit of rocking and bouncing around when sleeping prone in his bed or pram, all the time emitting "a low humming and keening sound . . . that reminded them more of a dog than of a human, and which they found alarming". Soon enough they found it annoying, too, and Gray Senior - a doctor and surgeon of some renown - fixed a hairbrush to the front of Gray Junior's pyjamas in the Pavlovian hope of forcing the boy to sleep on his back. Some hope. Gray slept on his front until he was 29, at which time he got married and over- night jounced no more. Freud would have had a field day.

The rest of us can sit back and enjoy Gray's discourses on literary masturbatory habits. In a childhood memory he recalls a professor of German, Frau Doktor Richter, telling him and the rest of his class about the 70-year-old Goethe's relations with the 17-year-old Christiane Vulpius. What kind of relations, asked Gray. "It vos a ferry luffink relationship," he was told. So, a sexual relationship? "Yess it voss," confided Frau Richter. "But only on ze higher leffel!" Pity poor Simon, then, who "at that age - I was 18 - had only had sex on one level, and it was a pretty low one, since it was with myself". Still, at least Gray isn't the only wanker around. Early on in the book there's a beguiling passage concerning an argument he and his best friend Harold Pinter once had about whether or not Gerard Manley Hopkins was given to manhandling himself:

One of us took the view that he did and one took the view that he didn't, but I have no idea which way round it was, if I ask myself now what view I take, did Gerard Manley Hopkins masturbate or did he not, I think I would say something equivocal, to include the psychic side of masturbation and possibly to exclude the physical side, which is perhaps a definition of "sprung rhythm" now I

come to think of it, and even "inscape",

"outscape" being actual, down-to-earth

masturbation or seed-wasting, but after all this I still don't know whether I argued for or against G M Hopkins as a seed-waster or seed-hoarder.

Everything you will either love or hate about this book is present in that - un-characteristically short - sentence. Gray's prose is made up of such baggy, short- circuiting, comma-clogged ruminations, and though I loved it, I can see that it could be found tiresome. Even Gray's most devout fans may find it hard to resist the thought of putting a red pen through one or other part of reminiscences like this: "We ran back to the house, and caught Mummy in a state, in something of a state, having just put down the telephone."

Yet for all its shapelessness, The Year of the Jouncer is as carefully constructed as a clock. The book might leap about through time, but it also contrives to give us a reasonably coherent picture of 12 consecutive months in the life of its author. Even the more nonsensical-seeming stream-of-consciousness stuff - "I was just about to write my first sentence of the day without any idea of what it would be, when somebody moved behind me, bent into my ear and muttered, 'I think it's wonderful'" - coalesces into meaning as the pages turn. Gray's apparently random ruminations are forever marshalling themselves into set pieces, and the set pieces are forever building to killer gags. His hilariously disingenuous diatribe against the producer who made a pig's ear out of the Broadway production of The Holy Terror is worth the cover price alone. Roll on next year and the publication of The Smouldering Diaries.

Christopher Bray's Michael Caine: a class act is published by Faber & Faber

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