Reuben, Reuben is a hugely enjoyable read. It deals with the tricky issues of friendship, drink, enmity, drinking, the sense of self, drinkers, love, drunks, poetry, alcohol, location and libation.

There is so much drinking going on in Peter De Vries’s novel that it would be unsurprising if the reader became inebriated just by reading the thing. Certainly it’s intoxicating stuff. Possibly the title is explained by the reader seeing double.

In a book that revolves around a poet, and a Welsh poet at that, one can reasonably expect alcohol to play a fairly significant part but in Reuben, Reuben the characters drink so much, so often, that one ends up instead seeking to read significance into any character who doesn’t have a drink in their hand at some point. McGland, the appropriately named priapic piss-head poet at the heart of the book combines heavy drinking with being a successful poet (that is, published and reviewed, even reviewed favourably) and managing to bed a number of women during the course of the novel. This success on the sauce is made believable by the suffering McGland must endure for his drinking, his art and his conquests.

There is also a fair smattering of sex, and a surprising amount of dentistry.

The book is split into three parts, each taking a different approach to examining the theme of relationships and how people rub along with wives, family, lovers, neighbours and friends, as well as taking a cool look at how adults go about making enemies and maintaining enmities, it’s a funny, often very funny, booze and sex soaked story with at least one noticeably poetic neat turn of phrase every chapter (appropriate, for a novel that revolves in more sense than one around a poet) and a selection of characters that manage to stay on the loveable side of eccentric. Just. Only just.

The first third of the book is a first-person narrative in the form of a written memoir from chicken farmer Frank Spofford. Frank is a native of Woodsmoke, Connecticut and feels cut adrift from his own home town, which has recently and suddenly turned into a commuter dormitory for New York, with housing developments springing up named after the farms, groves and orchards bulldozed into oblivion so that commuter housing can be thrown up. Frank is fascinated by his new neighbours and sets out to understand them by immersing himself in their world, encountering and developing a friendship with McGland along the way.

The second third of the book is more or less McGland’s story, explaining wonderfully that he is a man as ambitious as he is lazy, picturing himself as a conductor standing exhausted before an audience receiving rapturous applause, but never picturing the journey to that point, as that journey involves hard work. Even picturing it is too hard work.

The final third of the book deals with Mopworth, an English actor who fancies himself a writer, realises he has not got the talent for fiction and so is writing a book about McGland, hoping that some of accolades for McGland’s creative work will somehow transfer to his own effort. His efforts to write effectively about McGland are stymied by those who want to keep their McGland related secrets to themselves because of the shame going public would bring or, with Spofford, loyalty to his friend.

All three of the sections are an acute examination of different forms of relationships, in Spofford’s case the relationship with new neighbours he finds as fascinating as they are vacuous and his relationship with his increasingly alienated family. McGland too, has a curious relationship with the commuter community of Woodsmoke, a guest in the houses of the men and the beds of the women, he is arts emissary in the land of commerce, relying much more heavily on them than they do on him. Mopworth’s tale is one of suburban marriage, parenthood and disappointment.

The contrasts between the commuters and the locals, culture and commerce, loyalty and infidelity, as well as McGland’s cutting a shoddy swath through the society of Woodsmoke and Spofford’s reinvention of himself, to the alarm of his family, as an intellectual, provide for genuine comedy. ( )