Good Material

Alderton hands her breakup novel to a man this time, following Andy through the humiliations of dating in his mid-thirties after a long relationship ends, and her ear for the specific comedy of British self-effacement is what keeps this from feeling like a gender-swapped retread. The novel's midsection sags under the weight of its own misery, as several reviewers have noted, before a late shift to his ex Jen's point of view opens the book up. That structural gamble doesn't fully deliver the social bite of comparable dual-perspective novels, but it does complicate what looked like a straightforward comic wallow.