The first of the eight stories that make up this debut collection comes across as a pretty conventional exploration of American yuppie hedonism in the drug-laced vein of Bret Easton Ellis, Jay McInerney, et al – the cluster that Stephen Schiff referred to in 1987 as the ‘YAWNs’, or the Young Anomic White Novelists. But it turns out to be not quite representative of, and instead more like a prologue to, a book that is both less stylish and more challenging than the work of the YAWNs. 

I don’t know how old Greg Jackson is (he looks youngish in the jacket photo, though you can normally add a few years on to those – or take them off, depending on how much drug use we’re really talking about), but most of the stories do not concern boys