This Is How By MJ Hyland. Published by Canongate (stg £12.99)

No doubt, MJ Hyland is a uniquely talented writer. No doubt, her third and latest novel, This Is How, will win her battalions of new fans. No doubt, the movie rights will be as jealously fought over as Evita's remains. No doubt, only a philistine would append a disgruntled, "Yeah, but. . ."

So, call me a philistine. This is a perfectly alright novel. And that's what's wrong with it. You read it. Enjoy it while it lasts. Put it away and forget it. Shouldn't a celebrated literary author do more than the bare minimum it says on the tin? After all, this Australia-based, London-Irish writer was shortlisted for the Booker for her last novel, Carry Me Down (2006).

Waterstone's fiction marketing planner has hailed This Is How as "deeply impressive". The Hay Festival thrilled: "this summer's most brilliant novel". If it is, I'll be bringing the wonky draughts set to Brittas Bay in the July heatwave for a spot of intellectual stimulation.

Don't get me wrong. You should read this book. It's good. It's just that it's not mind-blowingly, hauntingly extraordinary. It's got a good story about a socially inept English car mechanic recovering from a broken engagement in a seaside boarding house. It's got a good plotline about the hopefulness of romance in an all-day-breakfast cafe, and the rekindling of hope within the dead-end walls of a maximum security jail. And it's got a really good central character. Patrick Oxtoby is young, complex, gauche, mystifying and unlikeable, and yet you find yourself half-hoping he'll get away with murder. He doesn't. Ergo, the maximum security jail.

It's a gritty novel, exuding that bleak workingman's dystopia that the English and Pinewood studios made their own half a century ago. Black-and-white visions of Richard Harris keep poking through. It's all unspoken feelings. Pathos abounds. It swirls around the cast of a young, widowed landlady, Oxtoby's jolly-hockeysticks, philandering fellow lodger, the photofit sweet­- heart, suicidal cell mate and distant parents.

Separately, the ingredients are first class. What causes the dissatisfaction is the writing. It's faultless. Clinically so, in the fashion du jour. Critics are raving about it already. Big on dialogue, short on syllables and so utterly generic that, if the author's name didn't appear on the cover, you wouldn't know who'd written it.

Decluttering is good. Of course it is. But this style puritanism is threatening to strip authors of their personality. John McGahern could do spare like no other but he was always John McGahern. Ian McEwan ditto. Admit it, don't you just yearn sometimes for a good old Banville-esque stream of big, fancy-worded consciousness?