Keeble's debut novel starts off as an engaging, Nick Hornby–style comedy about a young British writer who gets dumped by his gorgeous girlfriend, but the second half descends into turgid family melodrama. Narrator Scott Barron is the ultimate anomaly—a journalist-turned-poet whose book of sensitive verse, Men and Other Mammals, has turned a significant profit. But Scott's life goes downhill when his girlfriend, Ellie, an editor at a women's magazine, breaks up with him after eight reasonably happy months ("we just don't connect"). Another disaster follows when Scott lands a spot on a late-night literary TV show. He has a few too many drinks beforehand to calm his nerves and winds up vomiting on the air. Scott's bad behavior lands him in the tabloids and vaults his book onto bestseller lists. Soon afterward, however, Scott's mother dies from pancreatic cancer, and the novel veers into family terrain as Scott navigates his difficult relationships with his younger brother and his estranged father, who suddenly shows up at his mother's funeral. The sendups of the literary world are amusing, and the romantic material has an edgy appeal even though Barron's insecurities occasionally make him seem overly whiny and unsympathetic. The family drama has some solid, poignant moments, but there are too many hackneyed passages, particularly in a painful, ill-advised subplot that has Barron stealing a penguin from a zoo for his brother, who had a childhood fetish for flightless fowl. What might have been a first-rate romantic comedy instead wobbles between humor and sappy sentiment. (May)
