Some novels review themselves. They give you a synopsis. “A man takes a road trip through his own mind with Jon Bon Jovi.” They don’t hide the novelist’s Notes to Self, drawn from screenplay manuals: “Start with the weather … Set the scene … Give your character a flaw …” They then wittily describe that flaw: “My superpower is selective vision. I can see what I want to from a hundred paces.” They even spell out their own moral. “Every book is a self-help book if you read it right.”

All this could be frustrating for the non-reviewing, out-for-fun reader, but Johnny Ruin is charming in the way that Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind is charming – by which I mean, charming if you’re OK with a multilayered metafictional fiction about a depressed male protagonist who pines, mourns and defies death for a Manic Pixie Dream Girl.

I am when it does it as zappily, and with as much verbal wit and accessible emotion, as Johnny Ruin. This is Dan Dalton’s first novel, and it betrays a newcomer’s desire to do and say everything at once, but it also has a sentence-by-sentence assurance that he’s built up beforehand. Dalton was a BuzzFeed writer and the novel is formed out of short paragraphs, sometimes single sentences, isolated by meaningful space. At times, it doesn’t feel so much like reading pages as being showered in the confetti of them. This sentence confetti is in some ways the default form of contemporary, post-internet writing.

When novels seem to understand themselves too well, though, you start trying to understand them better. If I was doing this, I’d say Johnny Ruin was about a youngish man who destroys his relationships by objectifying and idealising the women he loves. His internal, infernal road trip – with Jon Bon Jovi as Virgil – shows him doing his damnedest to break this habit of breakups, and thinking he has succeeded. The plot implies that he has triumphed by letting the dream girl fly free. He hasn’t. A few pages from the end, we get: “She was poetry to me. Every part of her. She still is.” But Johnny Ruin’s lack of self-knowledge, his ultimate self-ruin, makes this a deeper and more powerful novel than his success would have done.

• Johnny Ruin is published by Unbound. To order a copy for £14.44 (RRP £16.99) go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.