Eat My Heart Out

by Zoe Pilger

(Serpent's Tail, £11.99)

Eat My Heart Out is a troubling - and troubled - first novel.

Its author Zoe Pilger describes a dystopia populated by middle-class types with limited talent and less morality whose cruelties are only further amplified by their derivative efforts at artistic expression.

Animals are boiled in water, excrement is painted on bedroom walls and the sex, as ham-fisted and dully described as anything knocked out by the likes of Alan Titchmarsh - is, well, the sex is neither here nor there.

Into this world of post-post-modern, post- post-feminist meaninglessness, navigates the neurotic and inadequate protagonist Anne-Marie.

Like Alice In Wonderland, to which this novel appears an unconscious and juvenile homage, she struggles to understand herself and her surroundings shifting in rapid succession from bars to bedsits and from hotels to stately homes.

The carousel of Freddies, Allegras and Sebastians confuses and the personalities are interchangeable archetypes who appear and disappear like disorderly puppets.

The only vaguely solid character is Stephanie Haight, a commercially successful but ruthlessly sadistic "feminist" author, who tries to cure Anne-Marie of her detachment but the older woman's shallowness is all she ultimately has to offer.

Pilger, an arts critic for that voice of liberal individualism the Independent newspaper, presents us with a world where there is no solidarity, no collective view and no sense of a common purpose.

For some authors, this quite interesting idea would have resulted in a spare and purposeful novel.

In Pilger's hands, the result is a piece of overblown, adolescent schlock that offers nothing and does so in an increasingly tedious and repetitive manner.

Paul Simon