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I looked up the symptoms of cirrhosis and discovered that they can include fatigue, loss of appetite, and nausea. By the time I was done this novel, I was pretty sure that I had somehow acquired cirrhosis from it. It is not a likable book, mainly because there are so few characters to like in it, supposing you can manage to distinguish one from the other by the time you get through it. Is Peter the enormously fat one? Which one is Garth and why do I care? Does Malcolm have any real talent or is he like everyone else and not have any visible or plausible reason to exist? This won the Booker? I suspect it was intended as a sort of Lifetime Achievement Award to Kingsley Amis, because there's no way this is a better novel than Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale, nor Robertson Davies' What's Bred in the Bone, nor Kazuo Ishiguro's An Artist of the Floating World, all of which were shortlisted in 1986, when The Old Devils somehow won the prize.