Spitting Distance is The Information for the safety pin set, concerning itself as it does with the elongated rivalry between two members of I saw Warsaw, a nondescript and quickly deceased combo forged in the white heat of Punk. One is Billy Wrose (nee Billy Petrol), goaded into torching an abusive college lecturer's car and subsequently renamed by the manipulative Kirk St. John. The virginal Billy latches onto the charismatic Kirk because he spies fierce intelligence, Punkish enthusiasm and, not to put too fine a point on it, an honest-to-god fanny-magnet.

But sex and money are what drive a wedge the size of the Empire State Building through this uneasy friendship. The self-same Empire State Building the band don't see when their much vaunted American tour turns out to be of American airbases. In East Anglia.

Kirk eventually metamorphoses in Kirk St. John "Punk Chef" and minor TV celeb; Billy into William Wrose, care assistant at an old people's home. But their paths have an uncanny way of crossing, usually through women, until a bedpan-saucepan showdown is inevitable.

We thank our lucky stars that Jon Wright is no Nick Blincoe; Spitting Distance's arrival on the coat-tails of the execrable Jello Salad is doing him no favours at all. No, his debut instead reads like Charlie Higson arranged as stand-up: the gags come so thick and fast it's all you can do to duck.

And that counts against it. This is a comic novel ("When looking for the worst insult I always turned to the teaching profession for inspiration"), but even in a comic novel you need a little breathing space.

But is it any good?

Actually, it's not so bad. Which might seem to damn it quaint praise, but this sort of thing is swiftly becoming just so much of a muchness. Yes, Wright is the thinking man's Blincoe, but his novel is also an inferior take on Jonathan Coe's The Dwarves of Death. (After a while these things are - depressingly - really only about who they remind us of.) And yes, the characterisation is shallow and subordinate to the rapid-fire gaggery throughout. And yet we can't bring ourselves to dislike it, even with its weedy payoff. Chords, cooking and colostomy bags, Spitting Distance might be junk food of a superior stripe, but it's junk food all the same.