This Is Your Life John O'Farrell Doubleday, 313pp, £10.99 ISBN 0385600984

The Guardian columnist John O'Farrell made his name with the funny, intelligent memoir Things Can Only Get Better: 18 miserable years in the life of a Labour supporter. His third novel, This Is Your Life, is disappointingly unoriginal. The narrator, Jimmy Conway, is a tiresomely familiar fellow. Affable and articulate but a bit obtuse, a bit faux-naIf, he has drifted effortlessly to his 35th birthday, underachieving his way through 14 years as a language teacher in a "dreary seaside town". He hasn't written the great film script/novel/poem he thought he would. His talent for prevarication is comfortably, comically commonplace - he even rereads self-help books on work avoidance. We can chortle knowingly at the jokes about ignorant foreign students, silly families and eccentric friends (the air-guitar champion, the smelly man and Nancy, the slightly-dippy-girl-with-a-heart-of-gold whom he used to go out with) because we've met them already in Hornby, Parsons or Helen Fielding.

The arrival of a batch of letters written by a younger Jimmy to his future self promises an unusual, not to mention slightly absurd, departure from the fashionable formula. "Teenage-Jimmy" was so sure he would grow up to be a Star that he sent himself cringeworthy advice on how to cope with celebrity later in life. By an artfully plotted series of coincidences, frauds and sleights of hand, our hero emerges, improbably and often hilariously, into the limelight. He is taken up by lazy media types as the latest thing, a guerrilla stand-up comic whose unique selling point is his elusiveness: he refuses to do TV, advertise his gigs or give advance notice of his appearances. In fact, he doesn't do any gigs at all, although the narrative builds to a fine set piece where Jimmy is finally to perform before a live audience of millions.

Predictably, Jimmy eventually turns his back on the world of fame because he feels "a real celebrity" only among his old, true friends; Nancy's love is worth more than the adulation of millions and the superficial, narcissistic affections of the Stars. How sweet.

There are some acute observations here, but O'Farrell's targets are often simply too slight. There is something tired and complicit about this tidy satire on today's celebrity culture. The running gag about the correct Italian plural of cappuccino will date as rapidly as the one a decade earlier about drinking any cappuccino at all. This Is Your Life will fade with the froth from our morning lattes: mildly stimulating, reassuringly familiar, but lacking the edginess of Will Self, Julie Burchill or Martin Amis.

As with so many slick, post-ironic popular novels, This Is Your Life is ultimately a combination of the feel-good and the facile. Do we really need to see modern life through the eyes of another emotionally and ethically retarded thirtysomething? A letter addressed by Jimmy to his earlier and still-to-come incarnations is indistinguishable from the efforts of his younger self; this is a truly adolescent moral universe.

O'Farrell is an able writer. The dexterity of plotting and the moral conscience behind This Is Your Life suggest that he will go on to produce something much more significant. But like the formulaic TV show from which it takes its name, this novel is simply a variation on an overworked theme.

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