Independent, The (London): Books: Paperbacks: `I guess I'm having kind of a dehydration

At first, reading this debut novel, you could be forgiven for thinking that its title could just as easily have been Everything Microsoft Word Has Ever Done. It's all here: bullet-pointed lists, numbered lists, underlining, big type, small type and so on. Yes, it's an experimental novel. But don't go away - it's actually rather good.

Narrator Chrysalis Moffat has an uncertain past. Told by her adoptive father that she was rescued by him during an American bio- warfare experiment in Peru, she still isn't sure whether she was actually just "dropped here from outer space". Perhaps she will never find out - at the start of the novel her father has been dead for several years, and her mother has just died. She is living in the family's beachside mansion, which her brother has just inherited, and she will not come out from under the bed.

Then her brother Eddie - a wonderful tragic-comic character - turns up with a New Age guru, Ralph. The thing is, Eddie is pretty wasted and Ralph isn't a real guru. Eddie has planned a scam: to turn the mansion into a spiritual institute. As we are helpfully told on page 59, in a section entitled "What Happens": "Like other enterprises of spoiled children, this one ends in madness, grief and debt." Eddie cannot forget that on an ill-advised trip around the world (his alcoholic mother warned him about the dangers of his epilepsy: "One beer, one joint, kablooey") he met a woman in the desert. (His first words to her: "Yeah... I guess I'm having kind of a dehydration episode?".) It turns out she is Ralph's stepsister Deesey, a professional blackjack player who was once abducted by aliens. And Eddie is still in love with her. Confused yet? Don't worry, the bullet- point lists pop up every so often to remind you what's happened, and what's going to happen, and you realise that experimental formats actually have a use (and become, in the hands of this author, poetry).

It is hard not to be charmed by this. It feels like Elmore Leonard with more depth, and a twist of post-structuralism. The dialogue is pitch-perfect, with laugh-out-loud lines. The story is nuts, of course. By the end at least two of the characters have seen God, one has left in a spaceship and one has been transformed by a miracle. In places - hell, in the whole thing - this is overdone. But there is some breathtaking writing here, and this is an exhilarating read.