John Irving rubs the nostalgia button hard. The equivalent thing in recent women’s stories is probably triggered by producing a tattered photograph. Irving brings out a few of those, too. Nostalgia does not have to be especially depressing (though it certainly haunts and depresses Irving) but it’s a bit like living under a long tepid shower. After a while one longs for a good cold plunge to tighten the muscles.

The easy way out of the shower recess is to introduce violence. Nowhere Man moves in a clear progression from sensitive sketches (rather than stories) of male vulnerability to increasing surges of violent behaviour. Perhaps it’s more like turning on the hot shower tap suddenly.

Many of these stories involve a passive recipient or observer, so that threat is as much a part of the effect as actual violence. There are fairly standard images of drunken yobbos, selfish husbands, ruff-as-guts intruders into suburbia, though Irving’s world is more graphic when he writes about built-up areas. The seedy types forgather there, is the message.

The message is strikingly well told, in deft moments that illuminate much, in telling silences around speech, in a fine handling of pace. This is particularly so in the longest story, ‘The Messenger’, which suggests that John Irving has it in his power to write a fine novel. If he does, I hope it has no faded photographs or old London buses.

‘The Messenger’ is striking because it develops four characters and does it well. It is a ‘classic’ Irving story in that it is certainly violent; it 1s about a voyeur. The characters kick, they have life and a fearsome sort of energy. My only real quibble is that the knuckly sailor, Murphy, seems too ideologically sound for his own credibility in his voiced tolerance for some passing gays. Murphy is the sort of man who would not give a stuff about anti-discrimination laws. John Irving would though, and the burden of many of his stories is the awfulness of the unrehabilitated male.