The Independent on Sunday
The comfort of self-identification offered by the Hornbys and Fieldings of popular fiction, not to mention the substrata of followers in their wake, has tapped into and exploited a whole generation's confusion about roles, identities and relationships. And for every smoking, dieting, neurotic, thirtysomething singleton in the world, there is a mediocre writer of disposable pulp fiction pocketing a fat advance cheque.
Most will endure as long as the desire for comfort books about the empty lives of materialistic, financially independent individuals lasts, although talk of the Bridget Jones bubble finally bursting has been around for some time. Readers, and women readers in particular, seem reluctant to let the shallow lives of their fictional counterparts rest in peace.
But when the dust has finally settled and the fad for hapless role models has passed, one or two of those eternally disposable writers will still be standing, Marian Keyes among them. Keyes's success has been quite extraordinary - she has beaten Fielding to the screen with a television production of her novel Lucy Sullivan is Getting Married and the big screen is beckoning too. Constantly in the bestseller lists, she has been producing hugely popular novels every year for the past five years.
Her publishers at Penguin have been so confident of success with this latest novel that they have swapped populist soft cover for expensive hardback: not a sign that Keyes is about to run off with the Booker but more that her marketability can withstand the price increase hard cover entails. It is a safe bet. Sushi for Beginners is, like typical Keyes fare, immensely readable - that combination of a pleasurable read with something that doesn't evaporate your brain cells at the same time. It may sound like an easy combination to pull off, but it isn't.
Lisa Edwards is a high-flying magazine editor expecting promotion to New York when she is suddenly downsized to Dublin to start a new glossy Irish magazine. "Glossy" and "Irish" are incompatible in Lisa's book and Keyes has great fun with the London sophisticate's horror of homely taxi drivers and shops that open late on Sunday. Lisa's assistant in Dublin is Ashling, whose depressive mother has inculcated in her daughter a kind of detail-obsessed control freakery, and her boss is that old romance reliable, the dark, tough-but-vulnerable hero, this time appropriately named Jack Devine.
The novel is not so much about finding a partner in an increasingly time-starved world, or about the highly amusing observations of office life, or even about adapting to new environments, although all those elements are there. It is, of course, about the nature of relationships between women, how they negotiate friendships, share their joys, pass on their pain. Keyes has a real talent for making it all seem fresh and funny; easy to identify with but also new.
Popular fiction will never by risky - that's not what it's there for. But neither does it have to insult our intelligence or serve up the same re-heated dish time and time again. Keyes gives popular fiction a good name, no easy feat in a field dominated by overpaid imitators and charlatans.