The Book Against God James Wood Jonathan Cape, 247pp, £12.99 ISBN 0224063952

In a recent review of Zadie Smith's second novel, The Autograph Man, James Wood, the most influential critic of his generation, attacked what he saw as the trivialising tendencies of modern fiction. The contemporary novel, he wrote, is becoming overburdened with information; cultural reference - the accumulation of "stuff" - is in danger of eclipsing character as its central preoccupation. In recent years, Wood has diagnosed this tendency, which he described as "irrelevant intensity", in the works of several prominent writers, including (besides Smith) Thomas Pynchon, Don de Lillo and Dave Eggers.

In Wood's opinion, novelists should concentrate on people rather than "the way the world works". His criticism has returned frequently to this theme. This explains his ambivalent response to Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections, which received such extravagant praise when it was published 18 months ago. Wood admired Franzen's intricate portrayal of the Lambert family, their fraught relationships and interlocking sensibilities, but disapproved of his broad social sweep, his attempt to hold up a mirror to the age.

After more than 15 years working exclusively as a critic, Wood, at the age of 37, has finally turned to fiction. Debut novels usually elicit a standard line of inquiry. How good are they? How much potential do their authors have? In the case of The Book Against God, however, another type of question is appropriate. To what extent does Wood the novelist live up to Wood the critic? Does he succeed in meeting the prescriptions for literature that he himself has laid down?

In one sense, The Book Against God perfectly embodies its author's stipulations. Although the novel is set in the early 1990s, one would hardly know it. Cultural references are conspicuous by their absence. The characters are like relics from an earlier age, one in which couples address each other always as "darling" and life is an endless round of cups of tea and choir rehearsals.

This is largely because the protagonist comes from such an old-fashioned family. Thomas Bunting is a penniless young philosopher, the son of a country vicar, whose life has recently taken several turns for the worse. His wife, Jane, a concert pianist, has left him and his father has just died. He has become estranged from his friends, and has all but abandoned the doctoral thesis he has been working on for seven years. As he sits alone in his bedsit, fitfully working on his grand project (an atheistic tract that he refers to as his "Book Against God"; or, wearisomely, his "BAG"), he reflects on the events that have led to this sorry state of affairs.

Thomas's problems arise from his failure to come to terms with his religious upbringing. We learn that he lost his faith as a teenager, and subsequently failed to inform his parents of this. The experience of concealing his lack of belief has resulted in a more general problem: he is pathologically incapable of telling the truth in almost all aspects of his life. He lies to everyone he knows (including his wife) and experiences a jolt of guilty pleasure every time he does so.

From recollections of recent visits to his parents' home in a village outside Durham, we get a sense of the stilted Bunting family dynamics. Thomas's father, Peter, is charming, learned and intellectually evasive. His son's frequent attempts to provoke him invariably fail: Thomas simply falls into the "holes" in his father's arguments. Peter's evasions leave Thomas with nothing solid to rebel against, no firm target against which to pitch his will. His retreat into the "ecstasies" of his BAG are his unfortunate way of working out this problem.

Thematically and structurally, The Book Against God resembles Saul Bellow's Herzog (a novel Wood has often praised). Like Herzog, it deals with the break-up of a marriage and the loss of personal and professional dignity. Like Herzog, it ends where it begins: in both novels, events are recounted from the perspective of a single point in the present. At times, too, Wood strives to imitate Bellow's high novelistic style, in particular when Thomas describes his journeys home or looks back on scenes from his childhood.

Novels that follow this type of structure depend more than most on their author's writerly abilities. Because the reader in effect knows what will happen, the plot cannot be made to carry the slack for any deficiencies in the writing. Unfortunately, Wood's writing in The Book Against God is not consistent enough. He gets some things right - moments of excruciating embarrassment, such as when Thomas reveals the existence of his BAG to the mourners at his father's funeral - but too often his narrative falters. He devotes too much attention to uninteresting characters (such as the unremarkable villagers who congregate at the home of Thomas's parents), and his habit of introducing each character with a lengthy physical description is formulaic. Many of his metaphors are too elaborate for the points they illustrate: Thomas, for instance, discussing his wife's attitude to his honesty, tells us that she "treats every lie as if it were asparagus, which, whether I eat one spear or ten, makes my urine smell with exactly the same pungency". Crikey!

As a critic, Wood's accomplishment lies in his sense of aesthetic certainty, his conviction that there is a right way for novelists to proceed. As a novelist, the evidence is that he lacks this confidence. The Book Against God is an interesting and entertaining debut, but in contrast with the superb fluency of his criticism it is timid and awkward.

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