The Gift, by David Flusfeder

Present laughter

You may find it mildly surprising that a book entitled The Gift, tricked out with a red sash announcing "Signed First Edition", should be published a few weeks after Christmas, rather than shortly before. Luckily, The Gift is something that any fan of contemporary British fiction should be happy to receive – whatever the time of year.

The protagonist Phillip's problems begin in an England schoolboys' football match, when he's on the wrong end of a revenge tackle that shatters his knee, ruling out a professional career. He ends up as a technical writer with a taste for displacement activity: anything's preferable to translating instruction manuals for Korean washing machines. His twin girls want a pony and dream of going to boarding school. His marriage to Alice, a rebranding consultant, seems founded on their desire to achieve a Taoist ideal of one thousand thrusts in a single coitus.

No wonder he starts to come apart at the seams, becoming obsessed with the giving and receiving of presents: specifically in relation to his friend Barry, a successful movie producer, and Barry's boyfriend, Sean. "We got something for you" is the gambit Phillip dreads hearing. Barry's gifts are extravagant, carefully chosen and impossibly hard to match – from handmade corkscrews to skiing holidays – but that becomes Phillip's quest, and a focus for his brooding anxiety.

Phillip shifts from feelings of social inadequacy to outright paranoia when he starts to believe that Barry's magnanimity is more malicious than kind-hearted. This is handled with great subtlety. Flusfeder's last novel, Morocco, was marked by a Kafkaesque sense of unease creeping into claustrophobic panic. There, the claustrophobia was generated by forces from without; here, the pressure comes from within. The first-person narrative means we see things as Phillip does: his may be an extreme case, but who hasn't fretted over a perceived imbalance in generosity?

The Gift is a comic novel with serious depths and compassion for even the hardest-to-like characters, such as Dylan, the film director who "outshone everything and could be mean to people" and who can sometimes remember Phillip's name, but not what he does.

Phillip and Alice's wedding anniversary party is in turns hilariously funny and horrifyingly distressing. It's one of the book's great triumphs. Another is the Syd Barrett sub-plot. When grappling with the question of what to give the man who has everything, Phillip considers Barry's admiration for that lost English pop minstrel, a founding member of Pink Floyd who was last seen wandering around Cambridge in a semi-daze.

Remembering that Morocco featured at least one real-life movie star as a character in the narrative, we look forward to the almost inevitable shuffle-on by the man who wrote "Arnold Layne" and "See Emily Play". I wouldn't dream of spoiling the fun by revealing whether or not the madcap musician makes an appearance.

Phillip's need to balance the books of gift-giving brings to mind B S Johnson's Christie Malry's Own Double-Entry. Flusfeder may not share Johnson's appetite for the experimental approach, but he is certainly doing something rather different from and more interesting than most contemporary British novelists.

Nicholas Royle's new novel, 'The Director's Cut', is published by Abacus