Alice is on a losing streak: her flat, her job and her boyfriend. It has been the same since she was 14 and all her friends went on holidays and had flings with the local Adonises while their parents turned a blind eye. Alice's parents always managed to choose resorts where fellow holidaymakers only spoke German and/or had blue mohican haircuts. So Alice has this feeling of being constantly on the losing side of a happening existence. Catching Alice is life after Clueless. Clare Naylor was probably penning it as the film's credits rolled: the timing is about right, and her narrator-cum-heroine is really just an English version of actress Alicia Silverstone, a little more grown up - but not a lot. When an old schoolfriend lures the 20-something to Los Angeles and lands her a glamorous job as PR to the stars, it seems Alice's luck may be changing. Soon, she has a wardrobe full of designer clothes, a kick-boxing class and - most necessary of all LA accessories - her own stalker, someone who sends her bad poetry, mangled flowers and a pathetic death threat. Woven through this unlikely story for no very useful purpose is a parallel tale of her libidinous cousin Simon, aka Lord Icarus of Kirkheaton. His wild adventures in South and Central America include getting drunk on a local spirit made from the saliva of a hallucinogenic Amazonian tree frog, falling in love with a pygmy, being pursued by bad guys and making nifty escapes from a posse of ex-girlfriends. Alice, meanwhile, is pursued by a slick talent agent with a penchant for fur-lined handcuffs and menage a trois - or more if he can get them - and by Irishman Paddy, the irresistible theatre director who loves women - usually for about three weeks. Finally, of course, she falls in love with one of them. Frankly, it is a bit of a relief. There are pages of silliness where you feel, in a horrible maiden aunt sort of way, that what Alice and her bubbly young chums need is a sharp clip round the ear and to be told to get a grip. It is a rites-of-passage book from an author who, at 27, has not had time to do more than be a winner of Vogue's Young Writers Talent Contest. Alice learns to love herself, not Jimmy Choo shoes, or a Toni and Guy haircut, or a Ferragamo jacket, to air-kiss goodbye to LA and to value what is right under her so-far-unaltered nose. Catching Alice is not smart or very witty, but it zips along and it has something to say about a particular age group: bit ditzy, oblivious to the old or the young, obsessed with wardrobe and with romance, rather than sex, and inclined to ditch men by vomiting all over them and then discussing it - as they discuss everything - with their best friends afterwards. But otherwise not an immoral, thoughtless bunch. Stereotypes? I have this sinking feeling - though perhaps that is just ageing body parts migrating - that this is the real thing. There is a conviction that carries the book along admirably that can only have come from an author who sat down at her computer to poke fun at her peer group with a 'been there, done that' attitude. Naylor, in other words, knows her subject worryingly well. Come to think of it, bright and breezy Alice on the front cover bears an uncanny resemblance to Naylor's picture on the back. A reasonable book for a dim-witted evening with a beer or two. Catching Alice by Clare Naylor Hodder & Stoughton, $170
