Who’s the real movie star – Cary Grant, or his suit?

As any reader knows, to their cost, some books are just thoroughly bad. Some – a few – are entirely great. But most are a mix of every quality and kind, not so much a curate’s egg as a big old hash of meat, potatoes, onions, veg and lots of lumps of leftovers. Todd McEwen’s new book – a memoir about his love of film – is a quirky, chewy gallimaufry containing a small jewel, a little masterpiece of a chapter, Cary Grant’s Suit, which lends the book not only its title but also its fundamental claim to your attention.

McEwen is what one might think of as a truly experimental writer – or in old money, a writer. He is funny; he is odd. He’s totally uncompromising: he makes Ian McEwan look like Frederick Forsyth. Not for McEwen the prizes, the podcasts, the Start the Weeks and the literary festival circuit. My guess is that he has never been a “Waterstones’s Pick” or an “Amazon Recommends”.

Most of his books are now out-of-print, and none of them is an easy read, even if you manage to track them down – and they can be a bit of a slog. Fisher’s Hornpipe (1983) was a kind of zanier A Confederacy of Dunces. McX: A Romance of the Dour (1990) was one of the best novels about Scotland published in the 1990s not written by a Scot. Arithmetic (1998) was a novel about childhood in suburban America: that one left me cold. But Who Sleeps with Katz (2003) was a great book about New York and smoking, and The 5 Simple Machines (2013) is a very funny book about sex.

So McEwen has form – or, rather, a long history of formlessness. The books all read as if they have been assembled from a vast range of possible ingredients and parts, and Cary Grant’s Suit is no exception. It contains a dozen largely unrelated chapters – there’s one on Casablanca, another on Chinatown, and so on – which are really all just about the experience of watching films over the course of a lifetime, essays and reflections from a cinéaste with a nice line in personal asides and reminiscences: “Getting used to the movies was like learning to drink or to smoke. You never knew when something adult and horrible was going to rush at you off the screen.” “I was born the year Shane was released. Still, they wouldn’t even allow me a cap gun.” “I have endured well over two decades of Christmas in the United Kingdom. Americans think Christmas in England must be like Dickens. It stinks.”

Pauline Kael this is not. Nor Anthony Lane. Nor even Clive James on TV. The closest comparison is perhaps with the work of the late, great Gilbert Adair – ah, the cultural commentators of one’s youth! They truly set the standard.

But the real reason you’ll want to read this book is not because it reminds you much of anyone or anything else, but because of the title essay, which is entirely sui generis. It has been knocking around in various forms for years. I think I first came across it in Granta. Or being read on Radio 3.

Either way, the piece is a little cult classic, about a classic: a short essay about North by Northwest; or at least, Cary Grant’s suit in North by Northwest. For, in McEwen’s words, “North by Northwest isn’t about what happens to Cary Grant, it’s about what happens to his suit. The suit has the adventures, a gorgeous New York suit threading its way through America. […] The suit strides with confidence into the Plaza Hotel. Nothing bad happens to it until one of the greasy henchmen grasps Cary by the shoulder. We’re already in love with this suit and it feels like a real violation.”

If I were compiling a new Oxford Book of Essays, I’d include “Cary Grant’s Suit” alongside Samuel Johnson, William Hazlitt and Joan Didion. It’s digressive, surprising, delightful.

Cary Grant’s Suit is published by Notting Hill Editions at £15.99. To order your copy for £12.99 call 0844 871 1514 or visit Telegraph Books