HELLO FRIEND WE MISSED YOU

A stalled writer returns home to Wales to tend to his ailing father in this comic debut.

Hill, the antihero of Roberts’ brisk but surprisingly deep first novel, is preoccupied with a host of crises that exist largely in his head. Put him on an airplane and he’ll imagine it crashing; give him a promise of a movie deal and he’ll foresee failure. (Multiple interludes show him struggling to send a thank-you email to Jack Black, who took a pitch meeting with him.) The low-grade stressors mask the deeper issues he's been evading: His wife's recent death; his mother’s death years ago, which he hasn’t come to terms with; and his strained relationship with his dying father, Roger, who’s asked Hill to come to his home near Bangor, Wales, to help him. In short order, Hill finds another escape hatch: an affair with Roger’s caretaker, Trudy. The two have little long-term potential; she’s leaving for grad school in Australia in a few months. But during the course of the novel, she’s a good-humored centering influence. If Hill is hard to fully sympathize with (he’s got a lot of man-child in him), Roberts is aware of the stuntedness, and Hill’s interior monologues are both funny and underscore his anxiety. Roberts’ earthy, bantering style recalls Roddy Doyle’s boozy Irish blokes, albeit at more of an emotional remove. That means it’s not entirely persuasive when the floodgates fly open in the latter sections; Hill and Roger’s tense relationship is kept at too much of a distance. But the storytelling is appealingly unvarnished, and Hill’s relationship with Trudy earns a tenderness despite (or perhaps because of) its ultimate doom. “Humans are generally an abomination,” Trudy tells him, “but there’s always hope.”

A witty, irony-rich coming-of-age story.