Drawn into the dread

The key to unlocking Steven Boykey Sidley's Imperfect Solo falls into your lap on page 109.

The protagonist, Meyer, asks his ex-wife about her PhD thesis on North American literature, and she tells him it deals with "Roth, Mailer, Heller, Updike, Ford, Bellow, Richler, De Lillo, Pynchon, the usual suspects".

If Sidley sees himself as the natural heir of these writers, he is not wrong. Unlikely as it may seem, the southern tip of Africa has given rise to a male narrative voice, the precise timbre of which has not been heard since Portnoy. This is not to say that Sidley's books are derivative. They aren't. They are an original product of the 21st century and as such ring with authenticity.

Meyer lives in Los Angeles and writes code for a soulless corporation. He has two ex-wives, an almost-ex-girlfriend and two children. He plays the saxophone better than competently, but not as well as he once dreamed he might. He has a Salieri-like capacity to detect genius in other musicians, but an inability to produce it himself. Above all, he is plagued by a nebulous feeling of dread.

There seems to be no particular reason for this sense that bad things are about to happen, apart from the awareness of mortality that comes with middle age. Then an event from his childhood is revealed that explains this inability of his to trust in the benevolence of fate. His dread proves to be well founded when everything he fears most descends upon him. Illness, accident, death and fire come to call with a suddenness not seen since God gave Job a hard time.

"Thin on plot and fat on rant," is how Meyer's ex-wife describes the likes of Bellow and Heller. And there is no shortage of rant in Imperfect Solo. Meyer and his male friends rant frequently and at length about the issues that preoccupy them. But plot remains king. Sidley's characters are more than the sum of their rants.

Surprisingly for such a masculinist writer, Sidley takes great care in crafting his female characters. Meyer's twin sister, his daughter and his ex-wives are all sharply and affectionately delineated. But perhaps his most successful female character is the persona he manoeuvres the female reader into inhabiting.

I found myself holding exasperated imaginary conversations with Meyer: "Smoking marijuana at a time like this? That's irresponsible. No wonder your ex won't take you back. Stop whining. Why do you hang out with your loser friends so much?" As this scold's voice took hold of me, parody reached off the page to embrace the reader.

By the end of the novel, much of what Meyer dreads has come to pass, and every bit of it was as bad as he feared. The experience has not transformed him. He has merely survived it, battle-scarred and slightly wiser. One thing he has not achieved is relief from his ever-present dread. Because fate is not done with him yet. His life is still full of people he cares about, full of hostages to a malign fortune. But the tentative optimism he expresses at the end of the novel suggests he has finally come to see this as more of a blessing than a curse.

• 'Imperfect Solo', Picador Africa, is available at Exclusive Books for R179. Snyckers' latest book, 'Team Trinity', was published last year by Modjaji Books