A scarred wanderer in Manhattan

Jackie Molloy, full of regret, walks the streets of Manhattan. His childhood has made him a solitary. In his youth was involved with the perpetrators of a deliberate and vicious murder. He is scarred, bereft, solipsistic, a wanderer. In Alison Dye's unforgettable novel, Jackie Molloy's lonely progress through the passages of the city and of his life is hauntingly endearing. Jackie is an ex-newspaperman, at 60 already verging on senility. His dearest friend loves him desperately. His memories are eating him up.

Alison Dye is a New Yorker, a social worker who now teaches in Trinity College, Dublin, and her experience of people hanging off the edge of a busy world clearly informs her writing; but so does her sharp vision into the hearts of her unheroic hero and his corrupt, knowing antagonists.

Jackie remembers the past - the time he used to take over from the chauffeur of a wealthy couple, the Mulligans: " . . . in this role he was not a person. He could watch and listen as if he were invisible, entering their lives like a vapour."

Jackie's vaporous entry into other lives includes a frantic, tender love for a girl who is the mistress of a thuggish businessman. Jackie watches over her, becoming her guardian against ill-doing.

His guardianship is a reflection of the only sex life he has had: his voyeuristic relationship with his blackmailing neighbours, Frank and Joanne, whose copulation he pays them to let him watch. When the Mulligans move out of state, Frank and Joanne supply him with a new target for his vaporous voyeurism, the businessman Chuck Wilmot and his mistress; he follows them to their meeting place, the No Name Bar, and lives their life at one remove. Increasingly, he is terrified as he realises, or thinks he realises, that Wilmot's wife and secretary are planning to kill the husband and pin it on the mistress.

Instead of moving from past to present, Dye slaps on layer after layer of presentness, each layer more painfully actual, each setting up a tooth-grating series of echoes of earlier pain and earlier hope. Even Jackie's fantasy life is another present tense, more real than his reality, as he tears at his memories and relives them differently, to make them better, to make them worse - to make them in any way not as they were.

This is an old-fashioned novel of style, where the writing is so lucid, controlled and elegant that it would lure the reader in, even if the characters were not so sweetly transparent as poor Jackie in his world of loss and anguish. It has unusually satisfying villains, too, real horrors, like Marilyn Wilmot, the wronged wife - "Well, what can I say, here I am just la-dee-da all by myself, boohoo, the poor misunderstood wife, left alone with three charming kids who are at beloved Grandma's while their mother goes nuts" - or Miss Laskowski, the calculating, dried-up secretary who knows every move her boss makes, or swaggering, slimy Chuck Wilmot.

Dye shows Jackie Molloy's life as a series of Chinese boxes, each one equally, vividly based in the now. As son of hard-edged union bully Mick Molloy, the longshoreman who lives on the run from tenement to slum, Jackie cringes behind his mother, then learns to watch the door for her return, year after year. Soon he is an old man, slashing at his arms with a razor, stumbling through the filthy streets with forearms swathed in toilet-paper. As a young adult, he learns to make sleazy deals, yet somehow is always the victim. As a reporter he becomes obsessive, following and interminably querying the trio involved in the murder with which he has his own, unacknowledged involvement.

Dye's style is tight as a drum. The story is never lost for a moment as the story hurtles on, flashbacks opening out the characters and their dirty work, enriching them, forgiving them. An unequalled novel of desolation and passion.

Lucille Redmond is a journalist and critic