Cameo by Rob Doyle review – a fantasy of literary celebrity in the culture war era

In this larky autofiction, the ups and downs of creative life are cartoonishly dramatised as the writer becomes an action heroRob Doyle’s previous novel, Threshold, took the form of a blackly comic travelogue narrated by an Irish writer named Rob. In one episode before Rob becomes an author, we see him as a sexually pent-up teacher abroad, masturbating over an essay he’s marking. That the scene is an echo of one in Michel Houellebecq’s Atomised (once named by Doyle as the best book from the past 40 years) hardly lessens our discomfort, and it’s hard not to feel that our unease is precisely the point. “Frankly, a lot of my life has been disastrous,” he once told an interviewer – which might not be quite as self-deprecating as it sounds, given that Doyle has also argued that “great literature” is born of “abjection” not “glory”.The autofictional game-playing continues in his new novel, Cameo, but instead of self-abasing display, we get a perky boo