They're germinating a new kind of generational novel in Great Britain. Writers like Will Self, Jeff Noon, Irvine Welsh and now James Hawes take pop culture's tropes and tricks, and recast them as sharply observed, relentlessly entertaining, and yet surprisingly serious literary endeavors that put most young Americans' fiction to shame. It's a delicate trick, this mystery dance between style and substance, but Hawes pulls it off in "A White Merc With Fins."

Discouraged by his declining prospects at the watershed age of 28 ("Maybe I was only ever short-listed for happiness"), the novel's incipiently balding and thickening unnamed narrator has a plan -- "the Plan," he calls it -- to use his temp status at a film company to rob an exclusive bank. He doesn't want to steal a lot of money, just enough to ascend one neat rung up the economic ladder and join the middle class. The friends he's enlisted to help him with the Plan -- Brady, who belongs to a gang of "Reservoir Dogs" fetishists; Chicho, a slapstick Spaniard; and Suzy, the flat-stomached love interest -- harbor equally modest goals. The narrator is a typically overeducated, underemployed and reasonably embittered product of British society. Life in a shed in his sister's backyard is no longer enough. On the other hand, "If I become an accountant now it means I should have become one six years ago." He has, however, accumulated a large and amusing repertory of real-life koans that brighten the Plan's shadowy schema.

Hawes, sometimes precious around the edges, writes with a hard-edged simplicity that practically begs for onscreen translation. At its best, "White Merc" sizzles like spit on a griddle. Just as the Plan threatens to fall afoul of its own modest intentions, it snaps back in a tight, thrilling way. Hawes then tops with another bang: a downbeat, nearly deadly aftermath that would have made a perfect ending to a book a little less eager to insinuate itself as the winning pop artifact it happens to be.

--Richard Gehr