Hi Nick,

You don't mind me calling you by your first name do you?

It's just that in your book all your male characters - spivs or gurus - seek out the kind of immediate, easy directness that implies being on first-name terms from the off.

Nick, I can see what you're trying to do in The Alpha Wolf. After all, your publishers' blurb is there to help, if not you. Your book is a "compliment" (sic) to "chick lit," it tells the world.

To be honest, a younger and more sentimental me reviewing this book would have been really impressed, tearful even. You'd have had me blubbing in the way that many of us adrift in the 1990s were, in need of a reality other than triumphant capitalism.

Fifteen years ago or so - before protests became as vital as prayers and comrades more important than chakras - I'd have really loved what you were trying to do here.

But now this story of Roger Cologne's journey from heartless careerist to vulnerable intuitive parent, from woman-bedding predator to caring, thoughtful partner leaves me disappointed.

I'm sorry Nick, it may be me. Marxists - even Christian ones like me - prefer stories of liberation and salvation being collective ones. We just don't really get all this "me, me, me," even if it is dressed up in the language of Western Buddhism.

Roger is as odious a narcissist at the end of the book as he is at the start. He may understand others more but he always seems to act solipsistically. His redundancy. His counsellor. His recovery.

I appreciate how you've tried to refract Roger's development through those nearest to him. But the impossible characters you use are just too archetypical to work for me, especially his daughter Saskia who, from the age of four seems to speak like Suzanne Moore, and Brian the down-and-out whom he insults at the start yet who then becomes his guiding spiritual light.

While I see you are not only an author but a sort of counsellor as well, I really found the last fifth of the book devoted to "the practice" a tad commercialised.

But don't take this personally, Nick. You write well and there is some humour and the occasionally genuinely non-synthetic encounter.

But you need to get Roger's nose pressed up against the reality of class war and the decimation of whole communities by the rich and the powerful and he could be a really important part of the collective fightback against rampant individualism.

Time to leave the sweat lodges - don't ask - and take to the streets, Nick.

Best wishes,

Paul Simon