The Autograph Man by Zadie Smith

Aptly enough, the young wizard of British fiction has turned to the delusions of celebrity. Deborah Moggach enjoys the show, but looks in vain for the people behind the performance

What's an autograph? "It's not me. It doesn't take from me. It's just ink." So speaks one autograph-giver, a black hooker called Honey, briefly spotlit for performing a Monica Lewinsky-type-thing with somebody famous. As existential nothings go, a scribbled signature is about as meaningless as you can get. For a start, you can forge the thing. Besides, why on earth would anybody want it in the first place?

By basing her second novel around this vacuum, of interest only to anoraks, Zadie Smith takes a risk. Of course, one only has to look at the sad saps on Big Brother to realise she has tapped into the zeitgeist, but can she make it matter for us? Or, to be precise, can she make its non-mattering matter? These questions are made more deliciously pertinent by the author's own entry, overnight at Number One, into the literary stratosphere with her dazzling first novel White Teeth. As John Updike says, somewhat unnervingly, "celebrity is a mask that eats into the face ... one can either see or be seen."

The Autograph Man of the title is Alex-Li Tandem, half-Chinese, half-Jewish, whom we meet as a child when his father takes him to a wrestling match at the Albert Hall starring Big Daddy and Giant Haystacks. Afterwards, in the scrum to get Big Daddy's autograph, Alex's own father dies and the novel proper rejoins Alex as a young man.

Our hero's avoidance of emotional engagement, of coming to terms with not only the death of his father but life in general, takes the form of getting stoned, getting drunk, being vaguely hopeless with his girlfriend Esther (who has a pacemaker that needs fixing), and altogether living at one remove from anything that matters. No wonder he makes his living trading in autographs and assorted, second-hand paraphernalia – "Castro's signature, Oswald's shirt, Connery's cheque stubs".

His colleagues are a seedy bunch of losers who sit around in a High Fidelity sort of way, making pointless lists. Alex's list-making also extends to the goyish and non-goyish, a riff purloined from Lenny Bruce, and while the story opens with talk of his bar mitzvah it anticipates, at its end, the Kaddish which a reluctant Alex will eventually say for his father.

His real obsession, however, is with the ageing film star Kitty Alexander, whose autograph he is desperate to own and to whom he has written letters for years – letters to which he has received no reply. Events send him to a trade fair in New York where, in the company of Honey, he tracks down the reclusive star.

Arriving at Kitty's brownstone, Alex is gripped with doubt; does he really want to make the dream a reality? "Not yet! He didn't want her caught, not yet! But the steps went up – wide, cold, mineral ... Another step, icy. And taking him closer to a world with one less sacred thing in it. Because fans do this: they preserve something, like the swirl of colour in a marble, in the solid glass of their enthusiasm. He had done that, Alex. For thirteen years he had kept her as perfect and particular as a childhood memory."

He discovers that Kitty lives alone with her dog, and is in thrall to her control-freak of a manager who has hijacked Alex's letters. Alex whisks Kitty to London, and into his own life. What happens when a mere scribble is transformed into a human being is a love affair of sorts, but there are other reckonings to be made in Alex's journey to self-realisation, not to mention a scam which convulses the world of autograph nerds.

This novel reminded me of Daniel Defoe's Moll Flanders. An ebullient, improbable plot rattles along but, in the end, we're none the wiser about who Moll Flanders actually is.

Alex and his friends are merely a collection of random characteristics. "Honey didn't believe in abortion any more, although she used to. Alex thought televised charities were run by crooks. Honey didn't see why she should touch things if she didn't know where they came from. Alex couldn't see the point of fake nails or figure-skating. Honey thought there was something weird about English children. They both wondered why there had to be so much mayonnaise on everything."

Whereas in White Teeth the characters were rooted in a real world, here they exist in limbo and remain strangely unconvincing, hijacked by their own larky prose. Who is Adam, what is he? One moment he's a slob, the next he's writing poetic haikus to Kitty: "When behind a young man on a bus, she finds herself staring at his neck. The urge to touch it is almost overwhelming! And then he scratches it, as if he knew."

This means that the big emotional scenes are unearned; a hospital visit to a dying autograph trader feels mawkish because we never knew that Alex cares about the man in the first place. Nor does Alex, or his two best friends, seem in the slightest degree Jewish – not even to the extent of Jonathan Miller's blissful observation about himself: "I'm a Jew, but not the whole hog. I'm Jew-ish."

One could say that this is irrelevant, that this proves a point about multicultural Britain, but I simply think she has failed here. And some of the writing is decidedly clunky: "Hearing Adam's voice sat firmly in the pros column of life"; "He had rented a smile off somebody and it was the wrong size." There are also the obligatory midgets and obscure bodily disorders, which have made their appearance all too often, post-Rushdie, in modern fiction.

Despite this, however, The Autograph Man is a glorious concoction written by our most beguiling and original prose-wizard, and far from a disappointment after White Teeth. Maybe it's all hat and no rabbit. But what a hat. And, hell, who cares about the rabbit anyway?

Deborah Moggach's latest novel is 'Final Demand' (Vintage)