From here to lingering desperation

Chick lit is the bread and butter of those (I'm not mentioning any specific sub-class so no letters to the editor please) who after a heavy bout of shopping sans stopping and a trip to the manicurist-pedicurist-beautician-hairdresser, wish for nothing else than to prop up their legs and stimulate their intellect. Not.

Despite such compartmentalising, this readership is normal and accepted. Lad lit, on the other hand, isn't and shouldn't by any means and terms be considered acceptable. And this book here proves my point.

Will Jackson is a 30-year-old single guy who earns around £100 an hour as a psychotherapist in an office facing Ann Summers and drives around London in a TVR which he describes as the envy of all the teenage boys in his neighbourhood. His best friends are married couple Tom and Barbara, who are around Will's age and raising twins, Ellie and Jack. Tom is a struggling actor while Barbara is the modern-day career woman who brings home the dough. So far so acceptable.

"Where's the dilemma?" you ask. Will grew up in a single-parent family with his mother and was told that his father had walked out on them when he was still a child. Will is now desperate to become a dad. By desperate I mean completely obsessed, ready-for-anything to the point of selling his TVR for a RAV4, becoming a dedicated member of Friends Reunited and even selling his "services" on eBay. This is the point where Will stops being desperate and becomes maniacal. It is not that Will is not lucky with girls or that he finds it hard to make dates with attractive girls. The problem seems to be the quintessential male lack of commitment.

This is where Matt Dunn fails to convince me as a good writer not once but twice. Like the thousands of bad scriptwriters and authors, he cannot stop himself from insulting his readers' intelligence. He makes the link between Will's upbringing and his obsession with paternity only towards the end of the book, wasting a lot of the readers' precious time on the way. After he introduces us to Will's much coveted girl, Emma, a waitress at Starbucks, he showers us with clues regarding her predicament: she tells Will that most of her weekends are already taken up and that she hardly has any time to go out on dates. Uttering a "Freudian slip", she then introduces her baby sister to Will as her babysitter. Got it? I'm sure you clever readers did but Dunn expects his (idiotic) lectors to be surprised once they find out the truth.

There are a few hilarious episodes in the book such as when Will mistakes the date Barbara set him up with for another woman and ends up acting puppet in the middle between the two warring ladies; or when he has his photo splashed on the British tabloids tagged as the man who goes out on dates to search for the woman who'll have his children and consequently made a fool out of on BBC's Today's The Day. Despite the assortment of mishaps, some much more serious than others, Will remains faithful to his decision of becoming a father.

Yet there are a couple of questions that kept coming to mind while reading the book. How could a 30-year-old single man living in Richmond have no friends except a married couple whom he's constantly acting third-wheel around? How does a man manage to find so many beautiful single dates over the internet? How can two attractive women act so belligerently over a mediocre man in the middle of Starbucks? How does a man so intent on fatherhood worry that his girlfriend's badly injured son, whom he's driving to hospital, could bloodstain his car seat? One must come to deduce that Dunn had a shortage of resources and a real lack of inspiration or that he is really not well connected to the ways of the world.

Dunn's vocabulary and writing style could be matched to that of an excellent Maltese 12-year-old student of English. His choice of words render the book quite dragging at times, which forced me to drop the book twice or three times to pick up some Woolf or Joyce in order to readdress my mental balance.

Those intrigued by lad lit might find this one badly interesting. Those who care to save their time, don't even bother to read the blurb.

• Ms Gatt teaches English and has an MA in English in Modern and Contemporary Literature and Literary Theory.

This book is available at Agenda bookshop.