Whither the literary salon? Once there was the Viennese coffeehouse, Café de Flore and Les Deux Magots; now we have Starbucks and Twitter. The setting of Mark Bowles’s intelligent debut novel is poised between these two poles. Café Amato is the favoured spot of Henry Nash, middle-aged academic philosopher and voluble grump, who is engaged in writing a ‘monograph’ about his late father, ‘a violent man, who brought with him his own violent weather’. All My Precious Madness, narrated by Henry, is an absorbing combination of reminiscence and observation. We learn that Henry grew up in Bradford, went to Oxford and worked in London before finishing his doctorate at Birkbeck. This information is divulged piecemeal between bouts of foul-mouthed, rhapsodic complaint. Punters in Starbucks are ‘sloppy latte-drinking fucks’ (espresso should be ‘as thick and as dark as arterial blood’); users of Twitter, the popularity of which is indicative of slipping standards in civilised discourse, are ‘ontologically bored’. 

Much of Henry’s antipathy is focused on a man he calls Cahun, a digital entrepreneur who fills Café Amato with his ‘uncouth and inhuman shit-speak’. Cahun is a distraction from Henry’s work, though his appearance is also a stimulus for the novel’s progression by ‘detour’ – Henry references Walter Benjamin’s use of this method and digresses with auto-didactic zeal. There’s something self-taught, too, about Bowles’s faintly quaint prose: he is prone to deploy words like ‘therefore’ and ‘wherein’, arch interjections and pause-for-breath commas.

Eventually, we learn that Henry suffered a breakdown at Oxford and that his father experienced something similar before he died. This breakdown precipitated a dramatic softening of his father’s demeanour. Over the course of the novel, Henry’s voice softens too. We see him admire his ‘eccentric life’ and re-evaluate, with