Fiction: Given the number of novels devoted to love - finding it, losing it, chasing it - it's astonishing how seldom fiction portrays the vagaries of love as most people actually experience it. Messy, contradictory and almost never attained in one knee- weakening epiphany on top of the Eiffel Tower, love is rarely tackled with the hard-nosed subtlety it deserves.
So it is greatly to Alison Jameson's credit that although she takes relationships as the subject of her debut novel, This Man and Me, she refuses to sign up for love's conventions as agreed by Chicklit Inc.
Instead, her narrator, Helen Wilton, falls half in love with a man whose laugh she can't abide, has a fling with another, knowing she only wants him as long as he doesn't want her, and mournfully beds men who have girlfriends or money problems or both.
Episodes such as these could make for fairly dreary fare, were it not for the beautifully precise insights offered by the clear-eyed Helen. At the end of a bad one-night stand, "our mutual disappointment and embarrassment are with us like great pieces of bedroom furniture". A conversation with an ex-lover "feels like we're trapped inside a Leonard Cohen song". Even the natural world is made strange; two clouds resemble "silent grey elephants" which "float slowly, easily, with careful direction as if they are being led along".
Each chapter of This Man and Me catches up with Helen several months or years after the last, a technique used by Susan Minot in Monkeys and Melissa Bank in The Girls' Guide to Hunting and Fishing. Like those fine American novelists, Jameson uses her stop-frame narration deftly, capturing the fleeting convictions and abiding compulsions of Helen's romantic life.
For although This Man and Me is densely peopled with Helen's friends and family - Birdie in Chicago; Simone, a fellow lecturer in UCD; her mother, Rue, back home in Laytown - and the early disappearance of Helen's father runs through the novel like letters through a stick of rock, hers is predominantly a life told through its love affairs.
At times, this preoccupation with relationships to the exclusion of all else is frustrating, particularly as Jameson's choice of a present-tense narrative can make Helen sound worryingly similar to a self-help addict reporting on her own emotions at five-second intervals.
But for the most part, Jameson has no problem keeping her readers hooked, a feat made all the more impressive because she dispenses not the cheap drug of romance but the hard-won intoxicant of perceptive and humorous writing. The team at Penguin Ireland are to be congratulated on an exciting and talented new signing.
Louise East is a writer and journalist
This Man and Me By Alison Jameson Penguin Ireland, 328pp. €13.99