When the novel opens, cracks are beginning to appear in Hugh’s life. His wife, Kate, is lonely and bored in their showy but remote new home. The advertising agency is struggling and experienced staff are being ‘let go’. There is talk around the office of riches to be made in American real estate, following the example of some guy called Bernie Madoff, but Hugh has already learnt to be wary of his colleagues’ bluster.

It is impossible to read about ad men now without thinking of Mad Men, but Madison Avenuethis is not. Don Draper and co. might be sexist and corrupt, but at least they sin in style. Their twenty-first century Australian counterparts, in Peter Barry’s telling, are utterly boorish; they booze, bonk, and backstab with zero panache. Can a decent man or woman survive, let alone thrive, in such a world? As Hugh faces a series of sticky ethical choices, this becomes the central question of the book. A besuited Everyman, idealistic but not immune to temptation, Hugh struggles to get ahead while keeping his decency and his family intact. Along the way a procession of characters offers commentary and advice. Some defend society as it is; some acknowledge its flaws with a cynical shrug; some rage against it from the fringes.

Writing earlier this year in the Financial Times, Jennie Erdal considered the current state of the ‘philosophical novel’. Do we still look to fiction to explain ‘what it means to be alive in an imperfect world’? We All Fall Down attempts to answer this very question, examining today’s preoccupations (real estate, romantic satisfaction, career success) with a deeper concern (what does it mean to live a good life now?) in mind.

As a critique of blokey business culture, the novel is scathingly good. Barry has a sharp eye for incriminating details, and Hugh’s gormless boss, Russell, is particularly vile and unforgettable. But as a morality tale or portrait of modern life, the book is less successful.

Barry’s first novel, I Hate Martin Amis et al. (2011), was remarkable for its blackly comic treatment of an outlandish and disturbing premise: an embittered, unpublished writer, hoping to find material for his next book, takes up as a sniper with the Serbian army during the siege of Sarajevo. It worked because it was impressively controlled; the narrative voice never wavered, whether it was poking fun at the publishing world or describing shockingly brutal war crimes. We All Fall Down takes fewer risks, both technically and with its subject matter, yet seems oddly less sure-footed. There is an imprecision about it, as though it isn’t certain exactly what it is setting out to do, or how.

Some of this is attributable to sloppiness with the facts. Kate’s parents live in Woollahra, but at one point this inexplicably becomes St Ives. It is ‘almost six years’ since the Sydney Olympics, but a character plays with ‘his new iPhone’, a gadget not released anywhere until 2007, and not in Australia until 2008. These complaints might sound pernickety, but such moments of confusion are not simply distracting. In a novel concerned with social mores at a precise moment in recent history, they leave the reader guessing about things that should be unambiguous. Is the global financial crisis looming or in full swing? Are Kate’s pompous, time-warped parents representative of Sydney’s east or its north (both rich and leafy, but different flavours of rich and leafy)? Later in the book there are further clues that it is 2006, so we can dismiss the rogue phone as a slip-up. But when glitches like this happen during scene-setting, they blur a picture that needed to be sharply drawn.

Kate herself, Hugh’s frustrated wife, is an odd creation. Thirty years old, she thinks and speaks like a character a generation or two older. If she did anything in the ten years between leaving school and having Hugh’s baby – university? travel? career? – we don’t hear about it. She seems to have gone to high school in the 1960s (‘She could remember at least two of her classmates “going all the way” with boys and being quite brazen about it’), and she is jaw-droppingly dependent on her husband.(‘She had no idea how life worked – the practicalities of existence without a man. Putting the garbage out for collection once a week loomed large in her imagination’). Of course, young women today can be sheltered and needy, ignorant and self-absorbed, but this particular brand of naïveté in a woman of Kate’s generation stretches credibility and makes it hard to see the Drysdales as either realistically drawn individuals or convincingly rendered types.

A similar slackness affects the prose itself. Unnecessary explanation pads out otherwise skilful dialogue (we don’t need to be told that a character is angling for the last word, say; if the dialogue itself is done well, as Barry’s is, it will be obvious). There are point-of-view wobbles, with an eager-to-help narrator clumsily interrupting passages of indirect discourse, spoiling the irony (‘She never would have admitted this to herself, but …’). There is an excess of similes, so many that they tend to confuse things, where a single well-chosen image would have clarified. Hugh’s colleagues, scared of being sacked, resemble ‘those small prizes in the bottom of the glass boxes at funfairs, with pincers hanging from a crane device falling to randomly grip and pluck one of them into the air. Who would be selected next?’ They feel as though they are ‘standing in a line-up, like peasants, facing a firing squad not knowing which’ are to be shot. And they remind Hugh of ‘a herd of impala on the African veldt being stalked by a lioness wondering who would be the next victim’. One of these would have done the job; three in the space of fifteen pages feels like overkill.

These are not disconnected gripes. They all point to an underlying imprecision – as though neither the writing nor the conception has been as sharply honed as they might have been. The result is a novel that tackles timely and important questions, but without the polish of Barry’s first novel or the lightness of touch of the best ‘novels of ideas’.