In one of his essays, John Berger recalls having been taught at art school by a painter named Bernard Meninsky, who smelled of dill pickles. Ryan O'Neill teaches at the University of Newcastle in Australia: he stinks of short stories.

It should be admitted at the outset that the rather rich and fruity fragrance of The Weight of a Human Heart will not be to everyone's taste  too sickly, too sweet, and too overpowering. In this debut collection, O'Neill storms the stage, adorned in gold lamé, candelabra on the piano, trailing a diamond-studded tailcoat. Here's swank: a story told entirely through diagrams and graphs; a story told through EFL textbook exercises; a story told through its footnotes; a story told using the writing tips of great writers. Self-regarding, self-conscious, self-aware, these are stories that will dazzle and impress, or appal.

What's amazing is not the prose, but the audacity of the ideas  audacious as in cocky, rather than cutting-edge. This is not concept art, but the literature of conceit: gimmick follows gambit follows gizmo, as surely as the theme from Raiders of the Lost Ark follows ET and Star Wars in a medley from the movies. Most of the stories announce their content with bright neon-lit titles: "Four Letter Words" is a story about four letter words; "Seventeen Rules for Writing a Short Story" proposes 17 rules for writing a short story; "Tyypographyy" plays with typography. According to O'Neill's acknowledgments, several of the stories were written as part of a PhD in creative writing, and the book might usefully be consulted  or indeed subtitled  as A Classic Compendium of Creative Writing Tricks and Devices.

We get Self-Referential Openings: "This story is 1,798 words long. Most of it is written in the past tense and in the first person. It's a true story, but the direct speech is approximate. I've read too many books where the writer claims to remember every word from a conversation which took place seventy years before" ("A Short Story"); "This story is set in Muloobinba, a fictional analogue of Newcastle, New South Wales" ("A Story in Writing"). We get Spellbinding Conclusions: "'Shazam,' I whisper. 'Shazam. Shazam. Shazam!'" ("A Speeding Bullet"); "'I think it's time for a sleep now,' he said" ("Last Words"). And we get Unexpectedly Moving Passages and Moments of Tenderness and Heartbreak, most notably in a number of stories set in or about Rwanda, in particular "The Cockroach", perhaps the finest story in the collection. This is unadorned and unplugged, and ends with the unnamed protagonist, a young girl, standing at a river's edge, on the run. "When she waded in, the water was cold, but she was no longer alone. She could feel the hands of the dead holding her afloat as she swam through the darkness."

At its worst, the book suffers from the kind of scholasticism that produces stories according to a formula. "The Examination", for example, a story written in the form of an answer to exam questions, reads like a story written in response to an exam question, "Write a story in the form of an answer to an exam question." There is a tendency throughout towards wearisome lit crit polemics and a strict po mo tempo: trick; point; trick; point; trick. But at its best, the book is possessed of an admirable logic and clarity. Scrupulosity provides opportunities as well as imposing limits. "Collected Stories" is an example of what's possible when literature is examined thoroughly and chronologically, and from the inside out, rather than the outside in: a young woman narrates the story of her mother, a writer, chronicling her life through her collections of stories. The mother is called Margaret Hately: the story is simply delightful.

The Weight of a Human Heart has all the urgency and vigour, then, that one might expect from a first collection: daring, intelligent, witty, full of new discoveries and exhilarations. "Look mum, no hands!" Just imagine what O'Neill will be capable of when he's no longer merely doing jump-tricks and is riding long distances.

 Ian Sansom's Mobile Library series is published by Harper Perennial.