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White Teeth made Zadie Smith, at twenty-five, the most talked-about debut novelist of her generation, and The Autograph Man was always going to be measured against a book it could not possibly resemble. To her credit, Smith did not try to write White Teeth again. What she produced instead is stranger, quieter, more inward, and far more uneven - a novel that is genuinely original in conception and frequently exasperating in execution.

The premise alone marks it as a departure. Alex-Li Tandem, the son of a Chinese father and a Jewish mother, makes his living trading in autographs, buying and selling the inked traces of other people's fame. The opening is the book's finest stretch: a day trip to a wrestling match at the Royal Albert Hall, undertaken by twelve-year-old Alex and two friends, which ends in the sudden death of his father from a stroke. It is panoramic, controlled, and emotionally direct in a way the rest of the novel rarely manages to be again. Fifteen years later, Alex is adrift - stoned much of the time, drinking too much, neglecting a girlfriend who is patient beyond reason, and consumed by an obsessive quest to obtain the autograph of Kitty Alexander, a reclusive star of Hollywood's golden age. His pursuit of this signature becomes a substitute for grief he has never confronted.

The concept is the book's great strength. The autograph trade, with its forgeries and its agents and its absurd economy of borrowed glamour, is a genuinely fresh subject, and Smith uses it to probe something real about how people chase fragments of other lives to avoid their own. The novel's preoccupations - Jewishness, goyishness, Zen, Kabbalah, the spiritual vacancy of a culture organised around celebrity and brand names - are ambitious and often arresting. When the prose catches fire, the wit is sharp and the philosophical undercurrent is real rather than decorative.

The trouble is the centre. Alex-Li is a difficult character to spend four hundred pages with: a passive, self-pitying figure whose drift the novel asks us to find more compelling than it manages to be. The story does not so much progress as accumulate, structured as a week in his life and crammed with digressions, jokes, diagrams, and informational asides that interrupt rather than deepen. The opening promises a momentum the rest never sustains; the bang of those first pages gives way to a long, baggy middle that tips from tragicomedy into farce. The early chapters are dry enough to test patience, and the book genuinely improves once it picks up around the midpoint, but it could have lost a hundred pages without losing anything essential. The supporting cast - the devout, perpetually stoned Adam; the envious Joseph; Rabbi Max wedging enormous furniture into tiny cars - is colourful but thinly drawn, and none of them feel quite real, a charge that extends to the protagonist himself.

The most damaging line of attack the book attracted concerned its handling of Jewishness. The accusation, made most forcefully and famously, was that the novel's relentless sorting of the world into Jewish and not-Jewish felt borrowed and external, more Lenny Bruce routine than lived experience. There is something to this: the cultural cataloguing can feel like a tic rather than a texture. And yet the verdict is not unanimous, which is itself revealing. The book won the Jewish Quarterly Wingate Prize for fiction with a Jewish theme, even as parts of the Jewish literary world dismissed it. That a novel could be condemned as inauthentically Jewish and simultaneously garlanded for its Jewish content suggests Smith touched a nerve more interestingly than her harshest critics allowed.

What ultimately keeps the novel afloat is the voice. Even when the plot sags and the protagonist disappoints, Smith's sentences carry a lyrical, restless intelligence that few writers her age could match. The comedy lands more often than not, and the dread beneath it - the fear of a life lived entirely through other people's signatures - is felt rather than merely stated. This is recognisably the work of a major talent stretching uncomfortably, and the discomfort is part of its interest.

The honest verdict is a divided one. As a follow-up to a beloved debut, The Autograph Man disappoints; it is messier, colder, and less satisfying than White Teeth. As a novel in its own right, it is a flawed, intermittently brilliant experiment well worth reading for its ideas and its prose, provided you arrive expecting a character study rather than a crowd-pleaser. Approach it on its own terms, not as a sequel to a sensation, and there is real reward in it.