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'The Beauty of These Present Things' by Avtar Singh: This is the story of a publisher and a writer and their search for each other. It is also a self conscious debut novel about the tangled workings of a young man's mind. Unfortunately, Holden Caulfied, he ain't.

The writer, Arjun, is a narcisstic self absorbed twenty something, with a serious affliction of self-love. Katie Menezes is the attractive, young publisher in search of Arjun.

Arjun is a budding writer who earns his keep "selling flats to old people who don't need them anyway". In between, he treats us to tedious quotidian descriptions of lady colleagues with 'wondrous tits', wet dreams, farts.. enter Katie Menezes. Her editorial antennae are up when she discovers an unpublished manuscript. This is good stuff, she thinks and dashes off to locate the source. Needless to say the author of the work is none other than our friend Arjun. In the process of her quest, Katie meets the characters from Arjun's novel, all of whom seem to have nothing better to do than to further expatiate on Arjun's life and times.

Rating: This is an earnest book. There's very little by way of humour, there's a lot by way of narcissistic self-absorption. If you like audacious self-dissection by young males, go ahead, buy the book. Just remember, Avtar Singh is not a J.D. Salinger and this ain't a patch on 'Catcher in the Rye.'

'The Beauty o These Present Things' by Avtar Singh. Penguin Books. Rs. 250.