Escaping a pre-life bubble

Fiction: In Benjamin Kunkel's Indecision, the anti-hero (or should that be alter ego - this is a first novel), Dwight B Wilmerding is in the throes of a post-adolescent, pre-life crisis.

In Holden Caulfield's time he would, at 28, be a late starter in the coming-of-age stakes but this is contemporary

Manhattan, where it is not so outside the norm for a college-educated young man from a privileged background to be trapped for a long time in a bubble that's hazily labelled "waiting for life to happen".

When Kunkel's funny, zeitgeisty novel begins, Dwight is still living in an apartment that's one step up from a student dorm, he's been "pfired" from his job at Pfizer (where he was over-qualified for his work in a call centre), he's still obsessed with his schooldays in his upscale prep school, and he is living by the gnomic ranting of an east German philosopher.

This character could have been far too irritating for a grown-up reader were Kunkel not so extraordinarily skilful at giving Dwight a voice that crackles with a funny, knowing intelligence. There's a smart quote on every page, and the personal journey is compellingly told with a momentum that makes putting the book down difficult.

This is a guy whose birthright has given him too many choices, where extended adolescence is the norm: "We belong to a social class and generation where our parents live too long and remain too economically powerful." His sister, for whom he has unresolved romantic feelings, is an eccentric anthropologist who offers to psychoanalyse him; he'd love to blame his problems on his parents' divorce but he knows that would be a lie; and his relationship with his father is clouded by his father's own self-absorption. Dwight himself is an amiable sort of fellow, fumbling along in a button-down Brooks Brothers shirt, happy to spend every waking hour thinking of little else but himself - if only he could make up his mind.

When Indecision was published last year in the US, Kunkel found himself critically acclaimed - lionised really - as the young writer (he's 32) best able to define his generation. There were comparisons with Dave Eggers, but Kunkel's humour and multi-layered cultural reference points seem less self-conscious and overworked than his west coast contemporary.

Dwight's biggest problem is chronic indecision, diagnosed by his medical roommate as abulia. As they're of a generation that's fully comfortable taking drugs,the roommates spend the night before 9/11 in an ecstasy haze, and Dwight tries out Abulinex, an untested drug which, it is claimed, cures indecision. While waiting for the effect to kick in - if it ever does - Dwight ditches his girlfriend (by e-mail, naturally) and heads off to Ecuador at the vague invitation of an old college girlfriend who he may or may not be interested in.

Once there, he finds himself thrown together with Brigid, a committed socialist with whom he develops a "romantico-sexual" relationship (his sister's term) and who sets him on a political path that would have been unimaginable to his former slacker self. It's this twist towards the end of the story that seamlessly blends humour with a political awakening and gives Kunkel's novel its edgy quality.

IndecisionBy Benjamin Kunkel Picador, 241pp. £12.99

Bernice Harrison is an Irish Tim esjournalist