The Man of My Dreams Curtis Sittenfeld Picador, 272pp, £12.99 ISBN 0330441280

Despite a title redolent of slumber parties and problem pages, The Man of My Dreams is no giggly romp in search of Prince Charming. Curtis Sittenfeld's is a world where only the pretty (and therefore "irrationally whiny and moody") girls get the guys, and where the plain and ordinary ones glare from the sidelines, festering in a pool of self-righteous bitterness. It picks up almost exactly where Prep, Sittenfeld's precocious debut, left off - the setting may have shifted from the claustrophobic corridors of a Massachusetts private school, but the boyfriend obsessions and ruthless self-analysis remain strikingly familiar.

Hannah Gavener, Sittenfeld's anti-heroine, doesn't ask for much: just someone "she could go with to a department store to buy an umbrella, or wait in the car while he went to the post office". Hannah dithers in and out of half-hearted relationships, falling for one boyfriend because "he took out her splinter" and dumping another because he pronounces genuine "genu-wine, like a used-car dealer". The eponymous man secures Hannah's undying love because he is "so exactly the image of what you think a boyfriend should be when you are nine".

While Sittenfeld's first novel offered an almost forensic insight into the world of a privileged boarding school, The Man of My Dreams occupies a surprisingly spartan environment, lingering sentimentally over seemingly insignificant moments while skipping over the ones we might be curious about. We learn in passing that Hannah studies art history, but insight into college life is limited to the obligatory drunken frat party, at which our heroine snivels into her sensible shirtsleeves while, inches away, a friend wrestles lustfully with a beer-fuelled jock. She moves from Boston to Chicago, from Chicago to Albuquerque, but Sittenfeld seems so reluctant to tear herself away from Hannah's lumpish introspection that a sense of place is almost entirely sacrificed. The one exception is a camping trip to Alaska, where "Hannah cannot believe that this, all of this, exists. It exists while she babysits the Professor's children, while she eats frozen yoghurt in the student centre on campus" - a sly nod to her frustratingly cramped horizon.

Sittenfeld's cruel humour occasionally slices through the banality. When Hannah's sister announces that she is engaged, Hannah obligingly pours on the cold water: "I mean, yeah, congratulations. I guess I just don't see him as very special." But the appealingly laconic tone cannot distract us from the fact that, because Hannah is almost entirely indifferent to the world around her, we cannot help but feel indifferent to her.

Sittenfeld is a stylist to be reckoned with, but The Man of My Dreams clings too doggedly to the sneering tone of her first novel to really count as a departure. What started as a razor-sharp insight into the mind of an angry young girl has descended into adolescent whingeing.

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