Fiction: In his previous book, The Truth About Babies, Ian Sansom brought his offbeat, minutiae-obsessed attention to bear on the subject of fatherhood, and was rewarded with critical judgments ranging from "just naff" to "a sort of joyful Waste Land: the book T.S. Eliot might have written if he had . . . gone shopping for prams".
On the brown, grainy dust-jacket of his new novel, Ring Road, these comments share space with photographs of a beer-mat, peanuts and matches and some convincingly reproduced beer-glass rings. The book looks companionable, as if it has been carried round the nameless fictional town whose story it tells. Then there is the author's preface, in which Sansom emphasises the simplicity of his intentions ("There are no themes that I'm aware of and any obscurities are unintentional") and assures us that "the book is meant for you to enjoy".
This apparently guileless appeal to his readers' lack of complexity could seem patronising, though it soon emerges as the disingenuous device it really is. For Sansom does have themes - home, and the deceptive notion of ordinariness - and a clutch of good stories and interesting characters to explore them with.
Presumably set in Northern Ireland, where Sansom lives, the novel begins with the return home, after a long absence, of Davey Quinn, the seventh son of a seventh son. Davey feels himself to be the most ordinary of people, a fact which has always sat uneasily with the local celebrity and expectation of special powers thrust upon him since birth. Driven away by the feeling that he has been a letdown, he now hopes enough time has passed for him to come home without attracting special attention.
His return, though, is disorientating: his luggage is lost, his taxi breaks down on the motorway and, drenched in a rainstorm, he arrives back in "our town" as bereft as when he left.
His old associates are the same and yet different from his memories of them. There is control freak Bob Savory, successful caterer and author of Speedy Bap!, who is suffering from a sexual crisis precipitated by his mother's unscheduled descent into Alzheimer's; there is one-time poet Billy Nibbs, who has become a ferocious book reviewer after being ripped off by a vanity publishing outfit; there is Colin Rimmer, editor of the local newspaper, determined to atone for previous journalistic timidity; there is reluctant evangelist Francie McGinn, whose devotion to the Lord cannot keep him from an adulterous affair with kitschy folk singer Bobbie Dylan; and developer Frank Gilbey, whose schemes have torn apart the town Davey remembers.
Sansom's weakness is that he sometimes looks down on his characters from too great a distance, which can make his tone a little superior, but this is outweighed by his interest in the details of their lives and environment, which builds cumulatively into a poetic elegy for a community. And as Davey Quinn makes his escape via the ring road near the end, there is a sadness about saying goodbye to the characters he is leaving behind.
• Giles Newington is an Irish Times journalist