[In the following positive review of The Laughing Academy, Cooke underscores Mackay's widespread appeal as a fiction writer.]

You have to laugh at life's absurdities. It's better than being taught how to cope in the Laughing Academy, aka the Funny Farm, remembered fearfully by one of the most vulnerable characters in these stories [of The Laughing Academy] as “a sort of stale amyl-nitratey whiff, a sniff of sad, sour institutional air or a thick meaty odour.”

Shena Mackay's keen ear for dialogue is complemented by the precision of her descriptive writing. She can evoke a mood or point up a meaning with one or two carefully chosen images—dead foliage clinging to a thorn bush, or plane trees in autumn standing like “dappled benign giraffes”. The humour in this hugely entertaining new book is often hilarious, over-the-top surreal; the prose style stays close to home, interweaving snatches of conversation, pop lyrics, jargon, advertising slogans, puns and scraps of poetry.

In one of the shorter pieces, “Glass”, a woman has to decide whether or not to leave her lover. She scrutinises every object she finds on her walk from “the little squares of opaque glass” in the pavement to the powder compact in the shop window, “a lid of butterflies' wings”. It is a lonely moment of choice but not an isolated one. Her decision is made in a renewed understanding of her own temperament, informed by everything that she has seen. Mackay's romanticism, like Allen Ginsberg's, suggests that the diversity of city life, all its perplexing phenomena, can be a comforting blanket keeping us warm.

She has a great talent for comedy in the English tradition: one of the strengths of contemporary fiction overlooked by those critics who like to diagnose its decline. I recommend they read “Cloud-Cuckoo-Land”, a study of blinkered do-gooding that bears comparison with Dickens' attack on Mrs Jellyby. The Rowleys are a family possessed. Ron works for Helpline Helpline, “established to counsel people addicted to ringing, or setting up, Helplines”. His wife is the charity worker from hell. His daughter escapes for a time by becoming a Jehovah's Witness. In the spirit of N F Simpson, the Glums, and the best of Alan Bennett, the writing builds to a crescendo of appalled observation.

Even funnier is the group portrait of the politically correct sisterhood, gathered to worship Ronnie Sharples at a women-only reading in the Charing Cross Road. Jean and Margaret, schoolfellows of the erstwhile Veronica, can pack a pretty mean punch themselves. But Ronnie's entrance, flanked by twin Tonton Macoutes and attended by her latest partner, Mog (“rumour had it that she had been bought as a slave in Camden Market”) subdues them temporarily. Ronnie is narcissitic, predatory, violent and richly deserving of her eventual humiliation. Could such a one exist in literary London?

Shena Mackay appeals to a wide readership, as was evident in the success of last year's novel, Dunedin. The broad range of her material probably has something to do with this, together with the sheer hedonistic fun of what she has to say. My favourite story, “A Pair of Spoons”, is the cleverest, sexiest piece of writing I've read since Angela Carter's The Bloody Chamber. Indeed, there is a fairytale element in Bonnie and Vivien's adventure: the Friendly Old-Established Firm of dealers, whose relationship is threatened by an Aladdin's cave known only to one of them. Love triumphs, as does Beauty. Don't miss this story of the Wolf, the Fox and the Filth.