The best thing about this first novel by the author of the bestselling memoir A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius is the front cover. The story’s opening sentences appear there in elegant capitals, and the device is momentarily arresting. But the interest aroused by this and other Shandean ploys, like the insertion of blank sheets and colour photographs among later pages, is quickly sabotaged by the banality of the content. As Will Chmielewski tells of the death of his friend Jack and his frustrated attempts — funded by a windfall — to go round the world with his other friend Hand, his garrulous account of flat tyres and airport delays becomes increasingly tiresome. And when it’s diffused with inner dialogues and flashbacks to a violent beating-up he suffered, it becomes more fatiguing still.

Will and Hand are in their late twenties but behave and talk like goofy adolescents. They spend a lot of time doing pointless stuff like jumping out of cars and trees. Will sends occasional postcards to two eight-year-old girls, full of inanely dim twaddle. The self-indulgent whimsy purports to explore the dangerous frontiers of madness, but never gets further than mawkishness. Will and Hand frequently have lengthy conversations that fill the pages with repetitive obscenity. The crass verbal violence is meant to extenuate the sentimentality in which it’s embedded, but the trick doesn’t work.

This applies especially to sections dealing with Jack. He’s constantly presented as a dead exemplar to the living (“He had calm where I had chaos”). We’re told that at basketball “he was the best pure player our school had ever seen”. His “old man’s wise and benevolent smile” and his resemblance to Kennedy are added to the encomium. This spiritual hokum is fatally undermined by Will’s undiscriminating ability to fall instantly in love with anything. “I want to marry this country,” he says after a few hours in Senegal. He also claims to love a policeman in Marrakesh, a female airline official at Heathrow, Latvians and a one-eyed dog.

But Will and Hand learn nothing new from what they encounter. Notwithstanding their scorn for tourists who “begged to be despised”, they carry America wherever they go. They play American music in hired cars, carefully listing all the bands. The Atlantic off Africa “shimmered like a dime”. In Morocco, “the light was Californian”. Estonia “could look like Nebraska” and every given landscape “existed somewhere in the US”.

The boldest exploration Will has made is kissing a girl at a Junior High dance, when his tongue became “the mapmaking conquistador of Mary-Kate’s dark wet mouth”. No wonder that was also Hand’s “favorite time on earth”.

Extravagant similes are meant to add class to the writing, but remain inert. “Eyes like animals on fire” or laughter “like the clashing of great white clouds” mean little on examination. Richard Brautigan performed empty ingratiating riffs like that 35 years ago. Other cadences, especially towards the end, ring the changes on words such as “beautiful”, “caring”, “holy” and “blessed hope”. The effect is embarrassing rather than illuminating. You can’t just proclaim a sanctified innocence in fiction; you earn it.

Sometimes the book seems as if it intends to suggest an ironic tension between this half-educated naiveté and the complexities of the world, but the narrative tone is always skewed towards the former. Will’s unrelenting self-centredness is endorsed. A debate about morality and an argument with God about retribution are conducted with such callow moody inarticulacy that seriousness is dispelled. Will’s fictional forebears such as Huck Finn and Holden Caulfield were not only cuter, they searched out depths of conscience unimagined here. This is much more like Wayne’s World rewritten for the gullible and pretentious.

YOU SHALL KNOW OUR VELOCITY by Dave Eggers

H Hamilton £16.99 pp352

Available at the Books Direct price of £13.59 plus £1.95 p&p on 0870 165 8585

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