Again, Hyland’s big achievement is in the distinctive, engaging voice of her young narrator, which doesn’t have a phoney thing about it.. But when his family begins to come apart, and he learns that the world can’t be described by a compendium of facts, measurements and records, he’s horrified to find dissimilation all around him, and his gift feels more like a curse.Carry Me Down fractures the adult world into child-sized pieces which, when reassembled by the reader, make up a predictable, sad but recognisably true story about the necessity and danger of untruths. The family’s dysfunction is confirmed in a scene featuring John, his father and a bagful of kittens, which cat-lovers and the squeamish would be well-advised to skip.It’s when John asks his father if he feels sorry for the kittens that he first realises he has a unique, infallible gift for detecting lies At first, this talent is a pleasant surprise. His father is an out-of-work electrician with an interest in phrenology. Her second is again narrated by a youngster struggling to make better sense of the adult world and while this one, at only 12, is still too young to be disaffected, he is something of a misfit, on the verge of a mental breakdown, and he shares Holden Caulfield’s near-pathological dislike of phoneys.He’s called John Egan, and he lives with his mother, father and grandmother in rural Ireland in the 1970s He’s Oedipally close to his mother. Surely art has always been, and continues to be, capable of providing higher functions, even while it is a commodity?Carry Me Down by M J Hyland (CANONGATE £9.99) M J Hyland’s first novel, How the Light Gets In, was narrated by a smart but disaffected 16-year-old girl and was compared to Catcher in the Rye. We’ve been sold the idea that it provides a space for radical dissentbut actually it’s just a bauble.

Like all conspiracy theories it’s persuasive in outline and convincing in the detail, but chooses to ignore the obvious. Since when, new museums of modern art and biennials sprung up in cities around the world, that allied themselves with corporate culture and modelled themselves less in places of learning or sites of enchantment than on “shops and theme parks”.More serious than saying that the art isn’t good enough is the charge that it’s been co-opted by the capitalist machine in order to mollify us with an illusion. A somewhat dense analytical-Marxist critique, it seeks to systematically strip away contemporary art’s pretensions to autonomy and radicalism, and reveal “its core function as a propagandist of neoliberal values”.For Stallabrass’s purposes, contemporary art was born in 1989, when capitalism triumphed in the Cold War. In this, by far the most strident and polemic entry I’ve yet come across in Oxford’s excellent series of “very short introductions”, he lays essentially the same charges against the entirety of the contemporary art world. Pr?sed so baldly perhaps they sound clumsily didactic, but they’re about universalities too – families, growing up, loving, dealing with disappointment and loss – and they are exquisitely formed and subtle. Nothing is out of place and absolutely nothing is wasted.Lapcharoensap weaves together two or three narrative strands, then arrives at the singular image which will make his point, at the same time that it hits you with the raw power of an exposed emotional truth.Contemporary Art: a very short introduction by Julian Stallabrass (OXFORD £6.99) In High Art Lite, his provocative critique of young British artists, Julian Stallabrass argued that the self-designated “sensation” of the 1990s was an empty spectacle and a trivial diversion obsessed with the cults of the individual, celebrity and commerce, shaped by market forces (which is to say, by Charles Saatchi’s tastes) rather than by artistic vision.

A meal which inevitably proves bitter and unpalatable, both literally and metaphorically, of course.Lapcharoensap’s stories reveal the cunning, double-pronged con of globalism, which peddles a sanitised, inauthentic version of Thai culture to tourists, at the same time that it dangles an unobtainable mirage of Western-style material happiness in front of the locals. For his 11th birthday, the boy’s elder brother has saved enough to take him for a small burger and fries at the local mall. So too, the boy in “At the Caf?ovely”, whose factory-worker father was crushed to death by a crate of toys he’d helped put together for American children. Her half-white teenage son, though, infatuated with American culture in general, and with the latest unobtainable girl in a Budweiser bikini in particular, has a more ambiguous attitude. In “Farangs” (literally: Caucasians, but more colloquially: bloody foreigners) we’re made to see ourselves through the eyes of a hotelier, as thick-tongued, pasty-skinned, uncultured and ignorant.