Pushing things a gag too far

Fashion and trends make for odd happenings in clothes and popular music, but exactly how far they can expect to dictate fiction appears tellingly illustrated by the light-weight rhythms of Zadie Smith's glib and gimmicky second novel. That this modest burlesque would be Booker longlisted ahead of John McGahern's That They May Face the Rising Sun or Janice Galloway's Clara is not only comical, it is serious.

The height of Smith's quasi-playful achievement here appears to be that she could spin out such a thin tale for more than 400 pages of half-hearted gags and TV dialogue. Uncritically hailed as a new and importantly young literary and multicultural voice on the publication of her Whitbread First Novel award-winning début White Teeth, Zadie Smith has retained the interest of reviewers as the manifestation of youth culture. The most obvious problem with this novel could be Smith's loss of interest.

White Teeth, with its punchy echoes of Salman Rushdie, while never the masterpiece of the hype, not only exudes awareness of the impact of racial and cultural cross referencing and confusions, but it also has energy. This new novel is as confident - Smith obviously believes in her jokes, asides and topicality - but it is slight to the point of irrelevance. This time, the echoes merely appear derivative, she is trying to be as slick as Rushdie, as funny as Martin Amis - but is falling far short of both. Curiously, however, Smith appears to have become suspended between US and British culture in much the same way as have Rushdie and the more satirically gifted Amis.

If the narrative is ultimately intended as a personal quest involving the eponymous hero's struggle to accept his father's death, the breezy randomness of the entire project, the lame story, the banter, the off-beat sub-plots merely serve to obscure such intentions; while the occasional interludes of deep thought, such as Alex pondering the genius that is Casablanca the movie - he "can think of no better example of the accidental nature of great art" - stand out awkwardly from the text like so many seconds of unexpected lucidity.

Neither as boy nor as man is Alex believable. A sequence featuring a day's outing with his doomed doctor father and two of Alex's pals highlights the already ill father further bonding with his already bonded son. Flash forward, and Alex is a grown up with a girlfriend whose chief characteristic is her pace maker now due for replacement. Poor old Alex suffers all the stock problems of existence: no personality, trouble from fellow tenants about his messy cat, and then there's his job - he collects autographs. The pursuit of the signatures of the famous and the later selling of them at auction is the stuff of the action. It is also the main narrative device as well as presenting Smith with several opportunities to ponder this evil called fame.

A lightness of touch prevails throughout, and Smith just about manages to keep her philosophical and religious meditations the safe side of pretentious. She can also be almost funny. The action moves between London and New York much as Smith moves between English and US city street culture.

Yet, if this were a first novel, I doubt much more would be said about Zadie Smith. Consider the following exchange between our hero Alex, now on the trail of Kitty Alexander, an old movie star, and the intimidating Honey, a fellow collector and successful prostitute:

"I just want to have the relevant facts. Ask someone, have someone tell me. That's what I'm used to. I grew up . . . my dad was a doctor."

"Yeah? What he do now?"

"Turns in grave, mostly. Dead."

Alex rambles about without ever becoming interesting; the sexual tension between himself and Honey is laughable - not forgetting that back home in London, girlfriend Esther and her pace maker are heading towards the post-operative. On you read, waiting for the punch line of something, anything. But the real gag is on us.

Hope finally limps to the surface when Alex comes face to face with Kitty, once the beautiful 1940s movie star, now an extremely likeable old lady concerned with her dog's welfare. In true Hollywood style, Alex manages to liberate the old girl from her bizarre agent-cum-captor and moves her from the US to London.

In an almost funny turn of events, our hero also frees himself from his various phobias and decides to sell off Kitty memorabilia - daring letters - in order to finance the ageing star. The sale is timed to coincide with the false announcement of her death - a peevish act of revenge masterminded by her agent.

Her "death" encourages the sales of her letters to soar, and Alex gathers the proceeds for her. But not before the old lady tells him in her still heavily accented English, "You know what I do this morning?. . . I wake up very early, and I step over you. And I go downstairs and I pick up the newspaper from the mat. And I read my own obituary. Now," she said, smiling half-heartedly, "This I think is a very harsh way to start the day."

THE sad thing is not so much having a premature obituary, as having the sordid facts of one's colourful sex life and the insignificance of one's career recorded for all to see. But not even Kitty can save the novel, or indeed elevate Smith's meditations on fame and mortality.

As a frothy rompette of in-jokes and asides lurching through the narrow routines of a collection of characters who do very little, The Autograph Man has marginal entertainment value if no substance. But as a novel contending for a Booker shortlisting on Tuesday, its longlist inclusion is an alarming act of indulgence - or possibly fear on the part of the judges anxious to appear trendily in tune with current fads.

The Smiths and McGregors might well learn that youth is not enough; William Trevor has a huge claim for this year's prize, while Anita Brookner's The Next Big Thing could well be her finest book. After two previous shortlistings, Rohinton Mistry could well win with Family Matters, while Yann Martel's marvellous allegory, Life of Pi, is a worthy outsider, as is Carol Shields with Unless. Similarly, Philip Hensher should be celebrated for deferring to traditional story as he does in The Mulberry Empire. Meanwhile, John Banville's stylish, laconic voice is long deserving of the highest recognition.

Any, indeed all of these novels deserve a Booker shortlisting well ahead of a Zadie Smith who, having abandoned the strong concept of plot that kept her first, Rushdie-inspired novel together, has tried to hang an entire narrative on a thin notion that was never all that more than a gag.

Eileen Battersby is Literary Correspondent of The Irish Times

The Autograph Man. By Zadie Smith. Hamish Hamilton. 419 pp. £10.99 sterling