You Shall Know Our Velocity by Dave Eggers

Last year, Donna Tartt and Zadie Smith came down with Second Book Syndrome. Critics lined up to knock them, while their publishers harboured unrealistic expectations. Now Dave Eggers has produced a follow-up to his idiosyncratic, successful début A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius. Will he fare any better?

Eggers' memoir, published when he was 29, irritated as many as it charmed. He prodded the story of his parents' deaths from cancer with a raft of postmodern flourishes. To some, AHWOSG was a writer wearing his heart boldly on his sleeve; to others, a meretricious piece of trompe l'oeil embroidery.

You Shall Know Our Velocity, a novel, is puritan by contrast. There is no fun to be had with the blurb, the author photo, the title page. It dispenses with such fripperies. The story starts abruptly on its cardboard cover. In America, it is self-published through Eggers' hip magazine and imprint McSweeney's and was initially unavailable from Borders or Amazon. Not so much vanity publishing, then, as humility publishing.

For those who found AHWOSG's peripherals apt and amusing, and were able to appreciate the warmth and scope of Eggers' writing, this novel is a worthy sequel. It is a contemporary travelogue that pitches itself against the Gap Year fantasies epitomised by Alex Garland's The Beach, in which an innocent abroad stumbles into life-changing adventures. We don't travel like that. We travel, especially when young, in a state of fitful, hyper-aware optimism, always on the look-out for cool moments and potential anecdotes.

Uneven and overlong, YSKOV forsakes plot for a single premise. Eggers' narrator, Will, has earned $80,000 by posing for a commercial logo. Paralysed by liquidity guilt, not to mention the death of his friend Jack and a brutal beating, he decides to travel the world in a week, giving away his windfall as he goes. He takes another friend, Hand, an exasperating, attractive know-all who shares memories of Jack, and his need to keep moving.

If Will and Hand recall Sal and Dean of On the Road, then YSKOV is something of an update of that book, with coast-to-coast hauls inflated to continent-hopping, and gas problems replaced by visa troubles. The duo want to act like old gods travelling the earth in human form – taping bundles of cash to donkeys, walking into people's homes with flowers – but can't escape being tourists. Taxi drivers dump them automatically at the nearest strip joint, and every burst tyre attracts multiple offers of help.

The novel speaks to our notions of altruism (they end up chucking handfuls of currency out of their speeding car) and internationalism. Its itinerary comprises Senegal, Morocco, Estonia and Latvia. Will notes, "Estonia could look like Nebraska and Nebraska could look like Kansas. Kansas like Morocco. Morocco like Arles". The people they meet are treated neither as national caricatures, nor as novelistic types, but as miraculous individuals.

In one typical scene, Will and Hand haggle up the price of a keyring in a Moroccan bazaar. Bargaining on scraps of paper, they work the storekeeper's price up to 40 times as much. "But the man didn't flinch. He was a titan. He touched a finger to his mouth, either gauging our sanity or pretending to mull our newest offer, and after a long perfect pause ... again acquiesced." He gives their prank the respect they crave; reality is temporarily upended; all are enriched.

This lesson applies to Eggers' readers. The sentimental streak that marks him out from the high ground of Updike, Roth and Franzen is precisely what irks a lot of people. They see Eggers as the worst kind of ironist – smuggling frivolity in under the cloak of seriousness – when he is the opposite. He is serious about his frivolity.

When he inserts a couple of blank pages it is not, as in Sterne's Tristram Shandy, for the reader to add their own words but – splicing a sentence in half – to represent the brief airborne grace as a speedboat skips from wave to wave. This is far from being a great novel, but its energy, humanity and constant curiosity can enrich your life.