Michael is a once-successful writer, likely in his 70s, and now dealing with the creative yips. As a young man, he lived "in a lulling crescent of apathy", a debauched life devoted to sex and alcohol. He was in an affair with someone else when he met a barmaid whom he named Astrid. They started a passionate affair, eventually moving to Athens in the time of the colonels. Something happened there that we don't learn about until the final few pages.
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Then there is Leah, in her early 30s, about the same age as Michael's two children from his first marriage. She comes into Michael's orbit and he sees an uncanny resemblance between her and Astrid from 40 years earlier. He hires her to tidy up his diaries and read some of the books sent to him for review, but in reality because he wants to take her to bed. Like all the other characters, she spends much of her time either drunk or stoned or performing sex acts with one of the other characters.
There should be some rule about the number of characters in a novel. In this book, they flourish like a rampant mouse colony after a flood, so that the reader is constantly trying to remember where they all fit in the narrative. But it isn't just the characters. The narrative itself is stretched into meandering byways that have little to do with the main story. The setting is mainly France, first Paris and then St Luc near Marseilles. The action moves backward and forward in time, taking in London and Athens, with alternate chapters in the first person voice of Michael and Leah.
The writing throughout is sharp and witty, agreeably acerbic in places, particularly when dealing with characters from upper class English public school background. Here is Michael recalling his mother, "She clasped her pale thin hands together and dusted them down on the bleeding and faded rose print that in another lifetime had made the valiant attempt to decorate her apron". And here is Leah describing her best friend Emma who "had managed to remain a human being despite becoming a fully functioning adult with both a cat and a live-in boyfriend".
This voice is particularly strong in the first part of the book, as if the author is pointing out how well she can write before getting on to the core of her story. There are lots of phrases and even full sentences in French and even though the meanings are guessable, they will be annoying to a reader without some knowledge of that language.
The title of the book does not seem entirely apposite to the action, though it may indeed apply to an older reviewer commenting on the writing of someone a generation-and-a-half younger. The world portrayed here is a reminder that the generation gap is much more than a literary creation.
