About to Fall Apart Author: Ashley Hickson-LovenceISBN-13: 978-0-571-39268-1Publisher: Faber & FaberGuideline Price: £12.99, 158ppAbandoned as an infant by his Irish mother and black father, 70-year-old Aidy, an aspiring writer, is trying to finish a short story by Sunday in his bachelor cottage. An ageing man, one weekend – at just over 150 pages, About to Fall Apart begs to be read in one sitting. But the book is also distinguished by its singular style of phrases punctuated with forward slashes: “Aidy didn’t want to punch him/ he really didn’t/ but that guy had it coming”. Ashley Hickson-Lovence’s previous work has experimented with second-person and free verse, and while his approach may daunt certain readers, his new novel delivers a pure way into one person’s mind that is ultimately devoid of affect.On one level the novel functions as a hilarious meditation on writing, especially the procrastinating part. Aidy snacks on crisps (“lets them fizz on his tongue like communion wafers”), surfs the internet, and, like every other author, fantasises about a celebrity future “in a swanky study with a shelf of all his books behind him/… drinking fancy South African white wine & reading Zadie Smith novels”. It’s also a portrait of an imperfect man with a hair-trigger temper and more than a touch of a womanising rogue. Married three times, Aidy is now texting a “busty blonde twenty-something” from Ukraine who “does something to stop some of the sadness that gets harder & harder to handle”. His loneliness is painfully relatable in its self-pity. Parents and children, blended and broken, are at the book’s heart. Like Aidy’s mother, Hickson-Lovence’s Irish grandmother gave up her biracial son – the author’s uncle – in 1950s Ireland, but although Aidy longs for the birth parent he never knew, he himself has three children whom he barely raised. Faced with his 15-year-old daughter, Eimear, Aidy “has to stop himself ruffling the top of her scalp like she’s a Labrador”. Hickson-Lovence’s title may echo Chinua Achebe’s novel Things Fall Apart, which also used a linguistically experimental style to address black families in a colonised world; however, although race remains a factor in the story, it’s the anxious, awkward nuances of family feeling that matter most. Despite their father’s relative absence, Aidy’s children are intelligent and well-adjusted. When they take him to the pub, we’re practically ecstatic, for Aidy’s sake, that they love him. Hickson-Lovence, who is in his thirties, has not only dared to inhabit a man twice his age, he has also invited us to do so. So when we emerge from the novel slightly hungover and somewhat hopeful, we realise that the most mind-blowing aspect about this journey is that we have undertaken it ourselves. Mei Chin is a writer from New York City living in Dublin