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Sat 05 May 2004Unsettled in the suburbsIrish Fiction: Chris Binchy's début novel was hailed as an up-to-the-minute X-ray of the zeitgeist, with its out-of-control "toxic bachelor" (Helen Fielding's phrase) serving as emblem of a crumbling Celtic Tiger.While rather shortchanging its other characters, what The Very Man had going for it was its portrait of a man in crisis.