Around halfway through Leo Robson’s enterprising and spritely comic novel, one of several interlopers in its cast is asked to help lay  the table. “Sure thing,” she replies. “So will this be one of those North London meals you hear about?” Our narrator, Johnny Voghel, a generally perceptive 30-year-old whose life is stalled by an obscure mixture of bereavement, unarticulated anxiety and generational ennui, begins to explain that the “popular version of North London” doesn’t exist, but is cut short by his aunt Miriam, one of whose functions is to be the book’s benevolently exasperated chorus. “That simply isn’t true. Where do you hear these things? Don’t tell me.” That fudgy, inchoate idea of a set of political, cultural and class circumstances does indeed exist, “but this isn’t it, I am sorry to report. Take a look at the local paper. It’s mainly about people breaking one another’s jaws.” Readers wondering whether this is one of those North London novels you hear about might feel that, although Miriam has a point, the tropes are stacking up to rebut it. With the apparently effortless social and technical ease with which Miriam conjures lunch, Robson assembles ingredients both familiar and recherché: a highly specific setting, Swiss Cottage, and a striking moment, the 2012 London Olympics; a labyrinthine family-and-friends backstory playing out over the course of a randomly eventful summer; characters with a wildly developed facility for aphoristic conversation; mild romantic and sexual peril; parties you would sooner eat your own leg than attend. Johnny Voghel is living the life of your average introspective son of privilege: hanging out in the tall, thin house he has inherited from his dead parents – refugees of Hitler’s annexation of Austria into Nazi Germany. On summer leave from his underwhelming job as an administrator and disengaged pastoral overseer at the West Midlands former polytechnic where he studied, he is vaguely attempting to form a connection with his absent relatives by going through the annotations in their books. When he wants to get in touch with his half-brother, Lawrence, for example, the pretext that comes to mind is the whereabouts of a book of essays by Susan Sontag. He needn’t have worried: Lawrence is close at hand, in flight from his marriage in Chicago and in London on mysterious business that extends but is not limited to an ex-girlfriend, a son, a teenage pregnancy and multiple speeches about modernity and the built environment. He is, unsurprisingly, reading Karl Ove Knausgaard. He is also aware of a deep deficit in his knowledge of new technology, and so Johnny introduces him to one of the students under his loose care, the quiffed and volatile Harvey. Harvey takes Lawrence to see the hangars that house giant internet servers on East India Quay, after which Lawrence takes Harvey to see a council estate. “Is it me,” Harvey later asks Johnny of his brother, “or does his conversational style kind of, like, prioritise force over subtlety?” Johnny himself has accumulated problems extra to Lawrence’s unfocused charisma: he has fallen for Harvey’s puckish friend Rory (a woman, despite the name), and the three of them are rumbling around London dodging Olympics-related roadblocks, discussing Johnny’s memories of growing up under New Labour (nostalgia, in Harvey’s view; “thinking back to something as it really was, in the moment, if you were young enough and incentivised to believe,” in Johnny’s). Everyone, as per the popular conception of both North London and its literature, has soon moved into the once-quiet Swiss Cottage house. One of the novel’s most interesting aspects is its fascination with double and shadow characters. There are several boys, naturally, in various states of lostness, and young women, including Lawrence’s ex, Emily, ensconced with her children nearby, and Johnny’s childhood friend Kate, a savvy working-class woman climbing the corporate ladder and keeping a sensible distance from the Voghels’ shenanigans. There is, too, a shadow novel. It emerges periodically, amid the cascade of one-liners (both Radio 4-funny and funny-funny, to use an acute taxonomy of humour once suggested to me), capturing the surges and lags of grief, the bewilderments of sibling dynamics, the mingled pain and pleasure in the doldrums of young adulthood. One minute you’re reading A Midsummer Night’s Dream riffed on by Martin Amis in low gear; the next you think you might cry. I enjoyed it immensely. The BoysLeo RobsonRiverrun, 304pp, £16.99 Purchasing a book may earn the NS a commission from Bookshop.org, who support independent bookshops