You’re invited to attend a very exclusive party. Friday, 1st April 2005. Cuzco, a private Soho club. Canapes, cocktails and coke are a given, but please also be prepared for infidelity, violence and betrayal. Elton John’s over there, sipping a fruit juice, holding forth. Gordon Ramsay’s in a booth, voice loud and language blue. Somewhere, Mike Skinner from The Streets is rallying against the state of the music industry in the UK. But the only people you’re concerned about are the quartet at the centre of this story about one fateful night: filmstar Hugo, journalist Michael, X-Factor reject Calvin and supermodel Mellody. Be honest. They’re the real reason you’re here.

Part of the relatively new (and quite small) canon of contemporary state-of-the-celebrity-nation literary novels, Leo Benidictus’ The Afterparty is an utterly captivating and hugely enjoyable addition. There are shades of David Llewellyn’s Everything is Sinister and Paul Auster’s City of Glass in the atmosphere and plotting, and nods to Austin Wright’s magnificent Tony & Susan in the execution, but it’s difficult to pin down the book in and of itself. The thrust of it is this: You, the reader, are reading a novel called Publicity by a writer named William Mendez while at the same time, between chapters, you are also reading the ‘real-life’ email correspondence between Mendez and his prospective agent, Valerie, as Mendez sends the entire book to her in tantalising piecemeal. As Valerie reads the pages with growing excitement, so do we. And as we see her and Mendez’s relationship develop, and the plot of Publicity thicken, we become aware that somewhere between the ‘fact’ and the fiction, something is not quite right.

That Benedictus has managed to craft not one but two utterly absorbing stories in a single novel is an impressive feat. But to manage to entwine them as comfortably and entertainingly as he has is some kind of devil’s trick. Email correspondence in fiction is a particularly difficult to pull off, because by their nature emails are banal, associated with work or flippancy, and because voices, when written down, tend to be homogenised without careful crafting. But Benedictus has captured Valerie and Mendez so perfectly, their own quiet drama quickly becomes as gripping as the novel-within-a-novel, and acts as the perfect pallete cleanser between the sumptuous, meaty chapters of Publicity. And when both strands start to crash together, well… the surprises don’t deserve to be spoiled. Find out for yourself.

And the writing! Straightforward, unshowy, beautifully descriptive. With just a few words, Benedictus manages to capture moments of human interaction and experience that other writers would waste paragraphs trying to get. Take, for instance, Mellody wondering during an awkward sexual encounter whether her clumsy suitor has ever ‘operated a woman before’. Or the entire page full of bass BOOMS, interspersed with random sentence fragments, to demonstrate a Ketamine high/low experienced at a noisy squat party.  And more, and more. Hugo, the beloved actor, realising quietly after a terrible accident that ‘this is what it means to be the villain’; Michael’s hilariously misjudged party attire, that makes him look like ‘an ambitious chemistry teacher’; Calvin mistakenly trying to impress a girl by telling her he knows Hugo personally, and then his abject terror when she asks to meet Hugo right this minute… Language wielded here with laser precision, carving out characters you immediately recognise, even if you’ve only ever seen them on television and cinema screens.

In short, then, a fantastic debut novel. The Independent have already mentioned Costa or Booker nominations for it, and I concur. Here’s one party invitation the judges, and you, would be foolish to turn down.

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