William Sutcliffe is one of the most accomplished of the younger British novelists, the author of three books that mine familiar territory for many men of his age (including himself--there is a strong autobiographical component to them): school, adolescent travel, angst, uncertainties about love and sex, uncertainties in general. He commented in a 2000 interview on the website of the publisher Penguin: "Evelyn Waugh rendered any distinction between popular and literary fiction irrelevant because his novels are undoubtedly brilliant in every sense. That's what I aspire to. I want to write books that can communicate to people with all kinds of interests." Waugh is an ambitious model, but there are obvious connections. Like Waugh, Sutcliffe is primarily a comic writer, using comedy for the purposes of satire. He deflates many forms of human pretension. His first novel is about a school in which neither the masters nor the students...