Specimen Days Michael Cunningham Fourth Estate, 308pp, £14.99 ISBN 0007156057

A vogue for genre-bending pastiche fiction seems to be emerging. But while the presiding geniuses of the style - Jorge Luis Borges and Italo Calvino - were always playful and ironic, the new trend is to give it a kind of New Age earnestness. David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas, for instance, is a series of stories, each in a different style (travel journal, detective novel, science fiction), taking the reader from 19th-century colonialism to a dystopian future of environmental collapse and corporate domination. The stories are linked only by theme and esoteric correspondences - crescent-shaped birthmarks, strange coincidences.

This seems to me a regrettable trend, not only because it feeds off the most feeble-minded, muesli-knitting tendencies in modern life (believing oneself to be a reincarnated Cathar or Tibe-tan lama, and so on), but also because it doesn't work very well. Pastiche is a distancing technique; everything takes place inside inverted commas; and so it tends not to go well with a sincere message about the future. Yet in spite of this, Cloud Atlas was a runaway success; and no doubt we'll see more of this sort of thing in future.

Indeed, Michael Cunningham has chosen to follow his deft and sensitive The Hours with an offering in the same vein. While The Hours interwove the experiences of two American women with the life and suicide of Virginia Woolf, the presiding spirit of his new novel is Walt Whitman. The book is made up of three stories, each featuring a man, a woman and a strange boy. Again, there are no explicit links, only an intimation from the similarity of the names across the stories that these are souls transmigrating - an intimation reinforced by the persistent recurrence of various totemic symbols (a horse, a glowing bow).

The first section is set in New York at the height of the industrial revolution, and is written in the style of the contemporary historical novel (sympathy for the social underdog, plenty of gory research). Lucas is "a misshapen boy with a wall-eye and a pumpkin head and a habit of speaking in fits". His brother Simon has just died in an accident at work, mangled by a mach-ine that punches holes in iron plates; his parents are despairing invalids. Lucas finds his only consolation in reading Whitman's poems (which he then involuntarily regurgitates) and in mooning after Simon's fiancee, Catherine. Taking over Simon's job, Lucas becomes increasingly deranged. He starts to believe that the machines are inhabited by ghosts, calling out to the living.

The second section, "The Children's Crusade", is a detective thriller set in the present day, featuring Cat, a cop with the obligatory hard-boiled shell and damaged psyche. She is a police psychologist whose job it is to field threatening phone calls, assessing the risk posed by each crazed caller. The plot hook is a rather grisly piece of post-9/11 imagining: small boys, apparently groomed by some mysterious "family", are hugging strange men in the street and then blowing themselves up. They are also, as it happens, saturated in Whitman's poetry, and find in it some sort of justification for homicide: "Every atom of mine belongs to you, too"; "The smallest sprout shows there is really no death".

The third section is pure science fiction. It is set - as these things tend to be - in a future of environmental collapse and corporate domination. Whole states are owned by companies with names such as "Magicorp"; survivors of the fallout squat in disused fast-food franchises; New York has been turned into a theme park for wealthy visitors from "Eurasia". Simon is an illegal cyborg (or "simulo"). On the run from the authorities, he falls in with Catareen, a Nadian (a lizard-like alien from a planet whose inhabitants have been shipped to earth to work in low- status jobs). They hook up with Luke, a deformed young evangelist, and travel together across the irradiated wastelands of America.

Cunningham is a competent, perceptive writer, and does his best with all of this. Yet while comfortable domestic and literary life suits him perfectly as a subject, he is not at home slumming it in the genre basement: he is hamstrung by the kitschy conventions of thriller and sci-fi, and does not bring much to either form. As for the overall scheme of the novel, Cunningham seems to have a lot of grand, vague things to say about industrialisation, love, terrorism, race relations - and, inevitably, America. Ultimately, however, Specimen Days is as muddled, and as silly, as it sounds. Whitman could have worked well as the organising principle for such a heterogeneous project ("I am large, I contain multitudes"), but the suspicion is that he is being used as just another piece of upmarket hocus-pocus: smuggled in to give the book an unearned coherence and gravitas.

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