The Privilege of Youth Dave Pelzer Michael Joseph, 228pp, £10.99 ISBN 0718146697

Dave Pelzer made his name (and a considerable fortune) with the A Child Called It trilogy, detailing what no feeling person would deny was a history of the most unspeakable childhood abuse. No doubt out of concern over repeating himself, his references to his natural family are darkly elliptical in this episode, which covers his life from around 14 to almost-adulthood, but this leaves a gaping hole in the book.

We begin in a hotel room, where the author rests briefly during one of his national tours as an "inspirational" public speaker. He describes his physical hardship on these roadshows in the most intricate detail: the amount of sleep he did or didn't have; the difficulty he has eating before an engagement, which leads to a raging hunger so that only the basest Burger King can sate him; the longing he feels for his wife and son when separated from them.

This author's fundamental problem is immediately striking. He only found his literary voice when he realised that his brutal upbringing could sustain the most minute retelling. The blow-by-blow abuse of a child is darkly absorbing - even though you as a reader might despise yourself for the fascination you have for cruelty. But when applied to the minor inconveniences of a comfortable adult life, the tone becomes risibly incongruous. So there's this doofus, in a hotel, rather tired for reasons that can only be poor planning on his part, praying that his boxers will be dry in the morning, so he can "carefully and painstakingly repack every article in its place; assurance that I'll be able to carry my necessities for the next round of flights". No, I'm not kidding - he was praying.

Spouse Marsha calls him while he's watching telly, and delivers the sad news that his mentor during his teen years has died. They have one of those conversations that people have on low-budget soaps when they're trying to talk normally and fill in new viewers on five years' worth of plotlines at the same time. "'I'm so sorry,' Marsha cries. 'Dan, he was like a father to you, wasn't he?' 'Yeah,' I choke up. 'Dan's the kind of father any kid would have wanted for a dad.'"

This bereavement catapults us, though not very fast and rather predictably, into Pelzer's adolescence. Having by now been taken in by a foster family, he is bullied at school for a raft of reasons that partly relate to his poverty and status as a foster-child, and partly to the typical gaucheness and inadequacies of all teens, everywhere in the world. Pelzer has no means of discriminating - indeed, doesn't even deem it necessary to distinguish - between unusual hardship and workaday angst, so there's an awful lot of tediously recounted inter-teen squabbling that inspires you to nothing beyond a snooze.

Finally, he finds acceptance among two local boys whose names I can't be bothered to tell you, and they get into scrapes which I can't be bothered to relate. Suffice it to say that they mainly involve motorised transport and they're as repetitive as trance music. Adults interject with inspirational truisms (I was in 'Nam, blah, blah and furthermore blah). A couple of them are mean, but mainly they are nice. There are astonishing gaps of empathy and information on the part of our hero - the family he lives with are barely named shadows.

Characters in Pelzer's world are interesting only in so far as they deliver a word of wisdom or, more often, a testimonial to himself. If this book reveals anything at all about the human condition, it is the danger of self-esteem. Rebuilding a tortured id must have taken some doing, but that's not what we see happening here - we see an adult man so befuddled by his early feelings of worthlessness that the only way he can exist is to attach enormous worth to his every thought, movement, action and word.

It's probably politically incorrect to attack such a consummate victim, but sod it - this is bad, cloying, self-justifying, unenlightening storytelling. He should have saved it for a member of some or other listening profession - they'd at least have been getting paid.

Zoe Williams is a columnist on the Guardian

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