by JULIET WATERS

There are few certainties in life, but along with death and taxes, one of them has to be that guys will never make a best-selling genre out of guy-centred romances. The freak time that they do buy romantic comedy, it's always cleverly disguised as something else, like the way Nick Hornby framed High Fidelity as a book about being obsessed with music and tangentially obsessed with love. Since one Hornby book will usually do most guys through their entire young adulthood, and since more often than not they'll buy it second hand, there's not much point from a marketing perspective of trying to replicate this formula.

So I don't know what major publishers were thinking when they decided that this would be the summer to push lad lit, the boys' equivalent of chick lit. Expect to see about a dozen titles this summer about the ups and downs of being a twentysomething boy looking for love. If they're anything as successful as Booty Nomad by Scott Mebus, the title heavily hyped by Miramax earlier this spring as a leader of the pack, you can also expect each and every one to tank.

Clearly Mebus was sent on some kind of suicide mission. Even the front cover of Booty Nomad, which depicts a young man leading a camel through a desert, seems to drive in the inevitable failure of certain strategies. Feeling sorry for him was one reason I read Booty Nomad. Who knows, I thought, maybe this is a good book sacrificed on the altar of impenetrable demographics. Also I'd read an interview with Mebus claiming he'd written the book more for women than men. Women readers have been betrayed so many times by the promise of the "new" Bridget Jones - maybe what they really needed was a Buddy Jones.

The appeal of this book to publishers is immediately obvious. Imagine Seth from The O.C. grown up, just a little, living in New York City and working as a producer for a successful children's puppet show on public television. His neurotic banter about The Eater of Souls, an ex-girlfriend who is currently stalking him, and The Goddess, the girl he's currently in love with, has a certain geeky charm. True, he's cursed with what he describes as "verbal haemophilia," a tendency to say the reliably wrong thing. But he reminded me of… of… and then I remembered.

Every girl has, or has had a real-life Buddy Jones. He's that neurotic, and if you're lucky, entertaining guy who seems to have a limitless repertoire of funny, failed relationship anecdotes. All of his friends are pretty sick of him, but fortunately he's met you. With your fresh ear, you are the one-woman audience to his well-crafted one-man show. This show can last two hours, two weeks, two months, maybe even two years, depending on how tolerable he is, and how long he decides to wait before hitting on you.

In their defence, Buddy Joneses can be a welcome distraction from time to time from your girlfriends and their all-too-familiar relationship obsessions. Buddy Joneses, however, are not good boyfriends (if they were they wouldn't have such a varied repertoire of failed romances). They're not even great friends really, since they're relentlessly self-absorbed. And they are very, very rarely, good writers. You will discover this when, not satisfied with your sympathetic ear, your Buddy Jones begins to grace you with his drafts of screenplays, spontaneous poetry, or the novel he wrote last night.

As Buddy Joneses go, Mebus is solidly in the better-than-average category. He hits the mark from time to time with witty dialogue. And a there is a classic scene where puppets trying to learn yoga inadvertently becomes something much closer to puppet porno than children's television. More often than not, however, Booty Nomad is a slog. Far in the distance is the ever-elusive mirage of the successful male-centred romantic comedy. Get up close, however, and there's just nothing there.

Booty Nomad by Scott Mebus, Miramax Books, hc. 400pp, $34.95