I guess, from the rudimentary research I occasionally do on books and their authors (i.e. I type them into Google), that I'm supposed to know something about Sam Lipsyte, one of the literary blogsphere's darlings. Nevertheless, from the safety of a stance of complete and total ignorance that I am sure his protagonists would support, I picked up his second novel, Home Land.

A darkly comic meditation on failure, the novel consists of a series of inappropriately personal, flamboyantly unprintable letters to a high school alumni newsletter. Their fictional author, Lewis "Teabag" Miner, is a self-professed failure who has passed the twenty years of his life since graduation in a drugged-up haze of wasted potential. He barely makes the rent by writing "FakeFacts" for a cola company and washing dishes in her father's restaurant, and the spends the rest of his time hanging out and getting high with his high-school loser friend Gary, a guest star from one Lipsyte's previous stories. Very little happens until the (rather implausible) denouncement/shoot-out at a high school reunion " Teabag's letters mainly revolve around his masturbatory fantasies, the sordid details of his day-to-day life, his status as someone who "did not pan out'" and what few flickers of hope and insight he can offer from his failure of a life: "my misadventures have taught me to covet the little things, to cherish, in short, the short straw."

Home Land is a difficult novel to read and review. It's a linguistic tour de force (I've always wanted to write that) but lacks any sort of drive or structural coherence. The sheer exuberance of the writing kept me going until the halfway point; although necessarily self-indulgent and really exceptionally crude, Miner's narrative is beautifully controlled, Lipsyte managing to infuse the strangest moments with lyricism and tenderness and even imbue his awkward and rather unsympathetic protagonist with a peculiar nobility: "Catamounts, once more I stuff my heart into the firing tube of language, loft it into the void."

But something happens after a certain quantity of this and the energy rushes out of the story like air from a popped balloon. Miner himself observes: "There are no themes, no leitmotifs. There is no story." And, indeed, there isn't. For all its linguistic pyrotechnics, the novel rings ultimately hollow, a case of style over substance and " appropriately enough " wasted potential. It's testament to Lipsyte's skill as a writer that I limped all the way to the end. It's a shame really because Home Land was very nearly remarkable. Although it remains eminently and wonderfully quotable ("Each of us walks to the beat of a different drummer. It's just that some of these drummers suck"), it nevertheless doesn't seem quite worth reading.