Running for a seat in the US Senate sounds tricky at the best of times. If you then imagine that your daughter’s got herself involved with a devastatingly handsome French fascist bent on fame via Fox News, your opponent is a former actor beloved by everyone over a certain age because of a character he once played, and your son has given up his job helping your campaign to focus on writing a musical about the life of Joan Didion, you get a picture of how tough things are for Congresswoman Nancy Harrison at the start of Let’s Not Do That Again.

As you can probably tell, Grant Ginder’s book looks at what happens when the politics of family and the politics of politics collide and intertwine in ways where one puts the other in jeopardy. The novel’s strength is that it does so with a light and humorous touch, thanks to the sharpness of much of the writing as well as the comically absurd touches that punctuate the book. Take, for example, this description of why Xavier de la Mariniere, the aforementioned fascist, loses interest in the needy women he exploits: ‘he had riots to incite, mosques to deface; he was a busy man.’ Or the fact that Greta Harrison, Nancy’s daughter, encounters Xavier online while playing a game called Nostalgeum, in which one builds things like Blockbuster Video and Tower Records stores – a fitting place to meet a man who trades in what Nancy calls ‘toxic nostalgia porn’.

There are moments, however, where the writing loses its edge. Titling a segment ‘In Search of Lost Time’, which then sees Cate Alvarez, Nancy’s campaign manager, pick up Proust’s novel, before coming out with the words ‘You don’t start counting seconds until you know they’re almost gone’, falls pretentiously flat. When Nick Harrison, Nancy’s son, is hunting desperately for his sister in Paris and the narrative has him see but not recognise Greta just because she got a haircut, it stops being wittily absurd and veers into the blandly unbelievable. Worse, though, is sloppiness like when we are told that Nick is ‘not yet willing to think that the worst has happened to Greta, at least not yet.’

Still, while I wish the novel had had a more precise editor, these moments are forgivable and generally forgotten thanks to a denouement involving an antique sword, a garbage chute and some nerve-wracking moments for the Harrisons in the company of an FBI agent on the day before the election. If, like me, you enjoy shows like Veep and In The Thick Of It, you’ll have a good time with Let’s Not Do That Again.