UTTERLY MONKEY
Nick Laird
½ (three and one half stars)
(Harper Perennial, $13.95)
BY day British novelist Nick Laird was a rising corporate lawyer, by night an invisible man. At parties with his wife, he would be “literally shouldered out of the way by people trying to talk to her.”
For Laird, “her” is Zadie Smith, the “On Beauty” author who is to living writers what Diana is to dead princesses.
Laird ditched the law firm in 2003 to fire up his own first novel, “Utterly Monkey,” an odd-couple comedy with a touch of both gangster menace and the hilarious tedium of “The Office.”
Geordie Wilson, a small-time crook from Northern Island, turns up on the London doorstep of corporate lawyer Danny Williams. Wilson and Williams were once as tight as brothers, but Danny has carefully put behind him unpleasant boyhood memories and the Troubles of Northern Ireland, both of which linger around Geordie like body odor.
Geordie has a bag of money that belongs to Protestant terrorists. Worse, he infuriates Danny in front of his date, a willowy black trainee, by mentioning an incident in which Danny hooked up with a skank so disgusting that she required new terminology: This girl was completely, utterly monkey.
The book isn’t sure whether it’s more interested in crime or relationships, and its sense of danger trickles out in the end. But Laird’s ear for the chummy hostility of guy talk, his dry cynicism and his utterly confident style – like a more restrained Martin Amis – tag him as a star in the making.
Soon, devotees will be shouldering his wife out of the way to speak to him.