In summer 1973, John Cromer,  now 23,  graduated in third class degree,  from Downing college, one of the funniest, most self-aware character in English fiction, who detailed observations on everything from constipation to lust are such a delight to read. He stays in the city , in a council-funded flatlet, kept afloat by benefits.  He leaves Mayflower House in his trusted red mini to visit cafes, pubs and  public laboratories in search of erotic adventure, meetings of the Cambridge Homosexual Activism Project (CHAPS), the crown court for jury service and his parent and sister come for Christmas dinner. Nothing happens and everything does.  Caret is a marginal sign an inverted V means “it is missing” or “there is a lack”. Without strength, mobility, money, partner or prospects, John’s life strikes people”  “only as a sum of lacks” as he struggles from one lavishly ornamented episode to another. John embarking on a new stage of life, as charm and wit aren’t just assets, they are survival skills.

Pilcrow is a Humdinger, a startling work that stands out. Conjuring a remarkable voice and mind, Caret is a feast of novel, with each chapter providing an adult’s daily intake of literary nourishment.

Disability commits John to narration as “the infinitely slow exposition of events”. Mobility, after all “is wasted in able-bodied”. From his home help Paula to Marko the pretentious milkman and Frank the gentlemanly licensed victualler , picked up in the “Four Lamps” loos, his  modest existence become an engine of intimacy. The Hindu spirituality that let him unite body and soul “ to conjugate desire  and divinity”.  His trusts in the municipal conveniences have forensic wit but little obscenity. John rifts common Sanskrit root of spirit.  His physical world sits uneasily alongside a quest for release from the earthly cycle of desire and reincarnations. In the “transgressive devotion” of Indian thought, John finds a way to thrive in a body that looks to others like “a Jalopy in a world of purring limousines”.  He can make realities overlap and wobble. The whole banquet is accompanied by lashings of John’s ideas about the Lady Godiva of militant twelfth-century Hindu poetry, about the eroticism of fine glassware, the omnipresence of the number 108 and the undeclared war between wheelchairs and carpet tiles.

Arch 1970s sitcom joins hands with a sour-sweet polymathic consciousness. Family Christmas in Bourne End, John’s prickly but put-upon-mother Laura serves him his favourite desert, Queen of Puddings, which beneath the toasted top, there’s something sweetly melting under the illusion of crispness”.

Caret by Adam Mars-Jones, Faber £25, 752 pages.