The Autograph Man Zadie Smith Hamish Hamilton, 400pp, £16.99 ISBN 0241139988

Zadie Smith has turned around the follow-up to her near-miracle debut in just a couple of years. It would be ungracious, even obtuse, to say that it isn't as good as the first, but here goes. It's only very, very good; it's only funny and charming and seductively readable; it's only the equal of anything being published at the moment in British fiction. That's all.

This is about Alex-Li Tandem, a 27-year-old Chinese Jewish dealer in autographs, who lives in a dull north-west London suburb on the Heathrow flight path. A borderline alcoholic, he nurses an obsessive interest in any and all memorabilia relating to the career and person of one Kitty Alexander, an aged Hollywood star now living in Garboesque seclusion in Brooklyn, NY. The people he hangs out with now are the same people he knew when he was 12: Joseph, who works at an insurance call-centre; Mark Rubinfine, a rabbi; Adam, a black, Harlem-born Jewish mystic; and Adam's beautiful sister, Esther, who suffers from a weak heart and with whom Alex-Li has been stepping out for ten years. In bed, Alex-Li likes to feel the hard metallic outline of her pacemaker under the skin, a detail of enormous eroticism and pathos. But he is cheating on her with a haughty bit of posh totty called Boot - a sly homage to Evelyn Waugh, perhaps?

In many ways, The Autograph Man reads oddly like a twentysomething's first novel. It sometimes has that callow, self-conscious feel, with its group of Generation X-y young friends who've known each other since, well, for ever - a kind of Central Perk diaspora - whose conversations showcase Smith's observational material about movies, getting drunk, being stoned, hanging out. Specifically, the novel has a freshman trick of suspending the narrative for sketches, quizzes and tables, which are never as interesting as the main text. The dust jacket unfolds to reveal secret micro-stories on the reverse and a whimsical diagram showing the cabbala of Alex-Li Tandem: a generous sort of hidden DVD extra feature. (This, I disapprovingly suspect, betrays the unwholesome influence of that tiring writer Dave Eggers, whom Smith outdistances in quality by many furlongs.)

Then there is the question of "fame" and "celebrity culture" denoted by Alex-Li's autographs themselves, a meaty significance heavily emphasised by the novel's publicity material. I wonder about this. Wised-up, inside-track stuff about celebrity is the sine qua non of metropolitan novels. The problem is that celebrity, however exciting it may be to experience in real life, always becomes dull when discussed in the fictional abstract, despite or because the writer is usually trying to hitch a free ride on all the supposed excitement.

That's not the case here, though - or not quite. The autograph man's livelihood is more than just a symbol of our supposed shallow obsession with fame. It is a metaphor for value, identity and authenticity. The novel begins with a prologue showing the genesis of this obsession. The young Alex-Li goes to watch a wrestling bout at the Albert Hall. While Alex-Li is trying to get Big Daddy's autograph, his father collapses and dies, having previously given his son and his friends a pound note each with his signature on. Alex-Li misses his father intensely and his later dysfunctional life and career are a reflection of that first, primal Autograph.

Most impressive is Smith's ability to enter the minds of so many different characters. Alex-Li sends Kitty Alexander fan letters that are haikus, imagining her inner life. Kitty is amazed and entranced at how Alex-Li manages to be accurate. I feel the same way about Zadie Smith and her sublime creative intuition.

In the second half of the book, Alex-Li travels to New York and meets three characters, older and more complex than himself and his suburban homies. We meet Honey, a Divine Brown-ish ex-prostitute turned autograph dealer and hygiene freak; Max Krauser, the mostly bald, completely paranoid president of the Kitty Alexander fan club; and then there is Kitty herself. Each of them is realised with compassion and flair, especially Kitty, with her chequered marital history: "Everyone should marry a homosexual at least once!"

The novel's Judaism is its most singular, perhaps its most eccentric part. There is secular-mystic noodling and also some shopworn comedy, derived from Lenny Bruce, about the way everything in life divides into Jewish or goyish. It seems strangely dated compared to White Teeth, and the whole subject is arguably a bit "10 September", as they say in the US. But it is just so left-field, and carried off with persuasive insouciance, that it's not only warm, but intelligent and humorous. By one of the most individual talents around, it's an unfakeable signature.

Peter Bradshaw is a novelist and film critic of the Guardian

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