The exclamation marks as I wrote them — !!! — appeared in my notes neatly to parallel the scribbled page reference — 111 — to the phrase that had prompted them. “Lower-middle-class” — narrator Eliot Lamb’s placing of himself in this precise stratum of British society surprised and intrigued this reader of Ben Masters’s impressive and — as he might hope I would say — very funny first novel about Oxford student life, Noughties (Hamish Hamilton, £12.99).

Is this how undergraduates still grade themselves (and, more to the point, others) this far into the 21st century? Could it be, moreover, that the description applies as well to Eliot’s creator? Twenty minutes on the phone to Ben on Tuesday and I had the answer to both questions.

Class, he thinks, is not a matter of moment for most at Oxford these days. It is a character defect of Eliot’s that it should be so for him.

“He arrives with a chip on his shoulder and forces his skewed vision on the world, expecting it to be the way he sees it,” Ben says. “That’s part of his inverted snobbery. By the time he leaves [the story is told in flashback, from the perspective of his and his friends’ last night out on the lash as students], he finds he didn’t really know any of the people around him and that he has got people wrong.”

Invited by me to place himself in society’s pecking order, Ben offers, only half-seriously one suspects, “boringly middle-class”. By this stage of our conversation, however, he has already stressed that the reader should by no means regard Noughties as a roman à clef or Eliot as a thinly disguised portrait of himself.

True, there are similarities between the men. Both are from Northamptonshire, though from different parts of the county, and both were at state schools (Ben at Roade School, which amalgamated last September with another academy after an unflattering Ofsted report). As for their shared Oxford background, Eliot is at fictional Hollywell College, which I thought likely to have been modelled on Ben’s alma mater, at a guess (from its name) New College. In fact, Hollywell is not based on any college, its topography carefully described to suggest nowhere in particular, and especially not Brasenose, where Ben studied until 2009.

‘The book has its background in Oxford,” says Ben, “but that’s pretty much it in terms of plot. Having said that, I don’t think a lot of the things that happen to Eliot are exceptional.”

This applies — as few will perhaps doubt — to his consumption of alcohol, which we see being downed in industrial quantities throughout the book. While acknowledging that “drink is a central part of the university experience”, Ben says Noughties presents a slightly misleading impression by virtue of its depiction of a celebratory last night.

This starts at a fully identified (and named) King’s Arms, in Holywell. Ben’s gloriously comic depiction of activities there will be relished by all lovers (myself included) of this great Oxford institution. His description of its decor might, by contrast, not entirely delight its owners: “The wallpaper in this joint is waxy; smoke-stained from times of yore. It’s lumpy and tactile, like a golden brown resin caked over the top of dead insects: worm circles and cockroach grids, the patterns of nausea.”

Next, the action moves to a bar with no obvious prototype in the real Oxford (a hybrid says Ben) and finally to a club called Filth (as apparently one Oxford establishment once was).

Ben writes with considerable authority of the drinks enjoyed and etiquette practised during this long night. I can’t pretend there was much he could teach me in this area, though I did pick up one new word (‘mullered’) for being drunk and another (‘vomming’) for an activity too obvious to need naming.

As for sex (and there’s plenty of that in the book) the author is not willing to discuss this aspect of his undergraduate life. Nor would I dream of quizzing him.

I am happy to accept Ben’s statement that his Oxford career was largely focused on study. “I wasn’t active in societies, though I dabbled in a bit of acting.” His claim to scholarship is convincingly supported by a first-class degree in English.

In gaining this distinction he followed in the path of Martin Amis, a novelist he admires. His work is one of the subjects of the Ph.D. thesis he is researching at Emmanuel College, Cambridge. Its concern is late-20th-century British fictional style and morality, with Anthony Burgess and Angela Carter among the writers in his lens.

“I like ornate writing,” he says, though I can assure any prospective reader of Noughties that ‘ornate’ must not be confused with ‘fancy’ where his own writing is concerned.

His prose is robust and original, with a daring defiance of convention over his use of such forbidden words as ‘underway’ and ‘alright’. While he reveals an entirely healthy contempt for Americans, whom he shows “Oh-my-godding” and the rest in the KA, I would have hoped that he could have spared his character Jack from a dash to the US ‘bathroom’ (for English read ‘lavatory’). I especially liked his coinage ‘gnat-gauzed’ for the River Cherwell. Ought this to be styled — and credited to Ben — visual alliteration?