Exit A, by Anthony Swofford

They should call it "dick-fic" - fiction written by men, for men, which leaves women cold. I mean the likes of Michel Houellebecq, Chuck Palahniuk - and now Anthony Swofford, author of the acclaimed US Marine memoir Jarhead, now a first-time novelist with Exit A.

These are "literary" novels, afforded a respect denied their pastel-jacketed sisters. But they are just as much fantasies in fictional form, and Exit A is an exemplary Specimen A.

Sex and masculinity are the perennial fascinations of dick-fic. Swofford checks them both, big time. His hero Severin Boxx, a high-school football star who goes on to an Ivy League university, is not sexually unsuccessful. During a row, his wife lists his past conquests: "The two girls at a time, the girls who only wanted it in the ass, the cutter, the coke head, the brother fucker". For him, "Those were all good memories".

The wife herself is no slouch, of course. She's a professor at 32, and still wears underwear that is "tight at her small perfect tits with a bit of lace at her cleavage, and stopped just below the underfold of her ass. He loved that garment."

Incredibly, despite this, Severin's life is not perfect. He's troubled - and stop me if you've read this somewhere before - by an incomplete relationship with his father. After the man's death, Severin "wondered if he'd ever really had a father... What was his favourite book, movie, car, movie star, song, meal, city?" Colonel Boxx "had seen the world, but he'd never put a Band-Aid on his son's knee".

Upping the daddy-figure angst, Severin also has a difficult history with his football coach, General Kindwall, commander of the US airbase in Japan where Severin grew up. Most complex, though, are his unresolved feelings for Kindwall's daughter, Virginia. She's a wild child (her Japanese mother is dead) who misspent her youth running with a Tokyo gang of petty criminals and holding up convenience stores. Because in dick-fic, crime is always cool - and girls with guns are hot.

As Jarhead showed, Swofford can do so much better than this unconvincing tale of reconciliation and promised redemption. In Exit A, his imagery can be fresh and creative, his descriptions of military life ring true. Yet both the story and characters feel generic. Blokes may empathise with Swofford's hapless hero (or wish they could), but this reader was left hurrying toward exit A, B or any other.