What the toilets look like – and what you can do in them – has become such a big part of bar and restaurant design that, earlier this year, the style magazine Elle Decoration devoted pages to the no-longer-quite- so humble toilet.. it was the toilets!

At Mash in Great Portland Street, just north of Soho, the gents’ urinals are made of concave mirrors designed to exaggerate what’s reflected in them and, in the ladies’, there are small TV screens that transmit live pictures of what’s going on in the gents – although only in the sink area.
“We want people to have fun in our restaurant and that extends to the toilets too,” explains a spokeswoman And they are not the only ones. When restaurateur Oliver Peyton (Atlantic Bar & Grill, Coast etc) opened his latest venture a few weeks ago, it wasn’t the food that everyone was talking about… Unless it’s true that modern urban man has become a mere doomed life-support system for his time-limited tools, capable only of functioning in isolation unless forced, disconnected, trivial, emotionally knackered, dumb, without dignity, pointless.. in which case, I’m glad I’m not a.. hang on.. no.. need to think about this.. no.. bugger off.. leave me alone…. Freeman has no work at all, and Ritz only works at two removes from the world, as a weekly television critic.Neither seems able to connect with women except as purveyors of bodily fluids, unless the woman is desexualised entirely: in Freeman’s case it’s Marcus’s mother, a frizzy-haired depressive music-therapist; in Ritz’s, the comedian, made literally sexually inaccessible by a great apron of belly-fat.If two such different writers are both telling the same story about men, what does it mean? Coincidence, surely. Both Frank Ritz and Will Freeman live fundamentally vacuous lives.

Neither has children, though Ritz has a possible by-blow and Freeman his self-elected surrogate. Both are mistaken about their own sexual nature, Ritz realising he’s a masochist and Freeman discovering “meaningful” sex And neither does useful or dignified work. Jacobson is a prophet, not a preacher; he never tells, but shows. Yet, vast as the gulf is between Jacobson’s ranting, bursting, forehead-banging Mr Nasty and Hornby’s reluctant, tepid, bloodless Mr Nice, common themes emerge. The all-time great lay, the betrayed friend, the language students, the fat comedian with whom he lies chastely in bed, eating black chocolate and drinking beer; the rage, the priapism, and what for? “Woman – mouth – droop; man – forehead – bang.” Language reduced to signal-flags; dick-driven, cunt- struck, last-resort ape-speak.There’s more, of course; riches more.

what? Apparently aimless, his physical and mental wanderings take him on a grand tour d’horizon of his erotic past and into a flaccid and acquiescent future. I mind most that we don’t play together any more, that there are no more jokes”) hits the road in search of… And didn’t his father do the same? Woman – mouth – speak; man – forehead – bang.”And so we’re off, as Frank, expelled from his house by bulimic Mel (“I don’t mind that we don’t fuck every morning, I don’t mind that we can’t talk to each other any more… Jacobson has always been a linguistic virtuoso, but under the pressure of this book’s theme – time running out, doors slamming, what now, what next – his effects are more reckless, his control more precise.It’s a joy to watch the mad staring-eyed bastard at work, even when he’s being relatively muted, setting out his leitmotifs: “He remembers his grandfather smiting his forehead whenever his grandmother opened her mouth. No More Mister Nice Guy is driven by a tumescent passion, leaps in open-fisted, wild-eyed, present-tense, roaring And such roaring. Plot? He’s just gone ape, standing there bollock-naked, flailing his giant tumescent intelligence around his head and bellowing like a prophet.

This is real bloke stuff, Jewish bloke stuff, and how insipid it makes the North London putative blokes look, with their Gentile gentility, their football and their CDs and their thin, polite Bloke sex.If there is a plot, it’s a variation of Orwell’s Coming Up For Air, or the sort of picaresque mid-life reassessments that Leslie Thomas goes in for, or a boiling hissing mixture of either, or both, and Portnoy’s Complaint. And then I realised that it was in essence the ultimate Bloke World, the universe of pornography.Which is a word you’d more immediately think of in connection with No More Mister Nice Guy Plot? This isn’t about plot This is about an eruption Jacobson’s hero, Frank Ritz, needs a big injection. There is a story worth telling in here, but Hornby hasn’t allowed himself to tell it, surrounding Will and Marcus instead with a cast of strangely-cliched walk-ons and rather static set pieces.It kept reminding me of something: the people who walk in at just the right moment, the careful predictability of structure, the interchangeability of the minor characters, the remarkable hospitality of the book’s world to the utterly undeserving. He can’t keep things going by wheeling on a whole pantheon of dei ex machinae, but nor can he rely on realism, which would just lead to dull Will sitting in his room listening to CDs and occasionally popping out for a poke.The result is that everything gets loaded on to poor Marcus, who becomes an exaggeration, almost a grotesque, having to drive the story but not wholly allowed to be the hero because he’s not – nor will he ever become – a Bloke And Blokes won’t read books about 12-year-old boys. the kid’s mother takes an overdose?You can see Hornby’s problem. Having lumbered himself with a cipher as his main character – a man utterly without desire, engagement or motivation – he finds himself having to steer a tricky path.

Disconnection lies at the book’s heart, not only in the characters but in the structure. About a Boy reads as though it’s a novelisation of a screenplay, as though wired together on one of those computer programs that do your story for you Hero’s ghost from the past? Check Seven-step plot breakdown? Roger Plot-point at end of Act I: um… Every adult in the book has fucked up beyond all recognition, and yet it all turns out reasonably sort of OK once Marcus has been got over the hump with the aid of an older Bloke Mate and a Nirvana T-shirt.The moral of the story is an agreeable smooth balm for the solipsistic disengaged. You can be a frozen infantile popster and trashmonger, but don’t worry, the kids’ll survive, they’ll get what they need, you can stay a teenager for ever, mostly. Hornby goes beyond his role as Bloke Apologist and takes on the mantle of Tetzel, flogging Bloke Indulgences. Solemn, clever Marcus finds out who Kurt Cobain is, makes friends with 15-year-old wild child Ellie, and develops a strategy for self-protection outside the nuclear family; Fiona only tries to top herself once.Looked at like that, the book is like Will’s flat: glossy, cool, but empty. Consequences: Will engages a little bit with the world and gets to have some meaningful sex (with Ruth, a tangle-haired book illustrator who says interesting things, although we don’t get to hear any of them).