Take this example, from an argument between Stevie and the narrator’s parents:
“I’m not going to college.“
“Of course you are,” said my mother.
“So that’s decided too, is it?“
“It’s only decided if you want any kind of future.“
“And who says my future is based on going to college?”
“Oh, I don’t know Stevie. The real world?”

None of the characters are individuated or seem to have any edges outside of this antic style (“‘We’ve never had a family meeting,’ I said. ‘Well, congratulations and welcome to your first family meeting, Rick. Will you please sit down?’”). Even the narrator’s ex isn’t safe; in her break-up letter she writes: “It takes two to tango. And I’ve been dancing alone too long now. I can’t even hear the music anymore when you’re around.” Like an endless sequence of “might delete later” photos, Divola takes a conceit and then thrashes it to death.

The women are particularly crudely drawn. Those who fare best tend to be either mothers or angelic wives (often remembered in the past tense). The remainder are groupies. Madonnas or whores, in short: the Madonnas idolised while the whores, having laughed at the men’s jokes, are promptly broken up with.

Like those figures of American literature whom the critic Leslie Fiedler described as constituting Peter Pan archetypes, from Dean Moriarty and Rabbit Angstrom through to their contemporaries (see, for example, any number of films released under the imprimatur of Judd Apatow or Todd Phillips), this is the story of a middle-aged man in permanent rebellion against the world: the adults, the phonies, the depredations of age and (cue Marlon Brando) whatever else it is that you have got.

It is endlessly tiresome.