The Misogynist, By Piers Paul Read

Jomier is a careful, correct, deeply disappointed man. He keeps a record, now digitalised and carefully indexed, of past and present; friends, lovers, arguments, financial transactions. Living alone at sixtysomething, the father of two adult children, Jomier cannot overcome his lingering pain at a failed marriage and not quite glorious career.

Piers Paul Read's novel paints a precise, bleak yet glancingly ironic picture of the existential unhappiness of one sophisticated, metropolitan man. He never made it as a QC; he lives in Hammersmith rather than the Kensington splendour of his ex-wife. He mixes on the margins of the real movers and shakers, passing the gleaming women, shops and restaurants that elude him on his regular 94 bus journey from the "Third World" that is Shepherd's Bush market. He is emotionally distant from his more successful son, who lives in up-and-coming Queen's Park, and physically distant from his much-loved daughter, who lives in Argentina with her macho husband and five children.

Interviews with Read, and that provocative title, suggest that this is a novel about feminism and women's rejection of the ideas of Germaine Greer et al. It is something rather different: a late-middle-aged man's view of the material logic that underlies so much that passes for love; an anatomical dissection of a slice of upper-class life, structured by career success, the right schools, second homes, with sex the eternal currency used to manage desire and disappointment. Through Jomier, Read allows himself to be brutal, comic and graphically truthful, drawing on everything from genetics to Darwinism, the lyrical metaphors of Christianity to a painfully acute awareness of the nuances of class.

Women come across as both calculating and helpless, depending on their place in the hierarchy and stage in the reproductive process. "Women are all over their husbands and boyfriends until they have had children. Once the inseminator has served his purpose, they look to the future... it is the son, not the husband, who will be around when she is old and frail."

There are some cruel observations of post-menopausal women with their falsely thick eyelashes, wrinkly necks and thinning hair, and an extended speculation on how some educated women used feminism as a form of flirtation and foreplay. In this world, politics is never about social justice but only a form of covert advancement.

In plot terms, little outward happens. Instead, things tend to shift beneath the surface. Jomier meets Judith, an older woman, and a yoga teacher, whom he likes and desires, up to a point. His rigid journal gives way to a daily enjoyment, although through Judith's eyes, we glimpse the absurdity and rigidity of Jomier's pedantic accounting, a man who knows "the price of everything but the value of nothing". But Jomier knows it too, helpless before his logical obsession with direct debits and pension funds.

A couple of surprising twists build to a moving if typically low-key denouement. Jomier comes to the realisation that "formulaic forgiveness is not enough. There can be no conditions or caveats or restrictive clauses.". It has to come "from the heart".

The skill of this deceptively simple narrative lies in Read's ability to show us how much both worldly and romantic disappointment cast our understanding of supposedly immutable human truths in the most negative and self-destructive ways. Its quiet triumph is to reveal how a change of heart, rather than of bank balance or social status, allows for a happier ending than any of us could imagine; how "Loving everyone is part of the deal".

Melissa Benn's novel 'One of Us' is published by Vintage