FICTION: Heartbreak,by Craig Raine Atlantic Books, 225pp £12.99

SOMETIMES the smallest piece of writing can catch the eye. In the My Hero series in the review section of the Guardian, the poet Craig Raine picked not a dead inspiration but the living playwright Patrick Marber. His tribute was such an economical, witty and even inspiring piece of writing that one's immediate impression was, if this was Craig Raine doing a small bit of prose, what would a novel be like?

Well, now we know. Raine has written a novel, and it is memorable, but for all the wrong reasons. The light wit has been replaced by a dull, laconic bemusement, the unashamed erudition has become sophomore pedantry and the racy element – Raine had described Marber spicing up some stage dialogue – has became a series of endless, cringe-inducing sexual preoccupations.

It is hard to convey just how disappointing and even embarrassing this book is. Raine is one of the most important English poets, but this is an experiment in navel-gazing, or rather crotch-gazing, that would have been better off not seeing the light of published day.

The novel has already been savaged by Terry Eagleton in the London Review of Books, in a withering assessment that became a news story, in the way of these English literary spats. But Eagleton could have been much more damning. His focus was mainly on the linguistic pretentiousness of the story (or stories: the novel is a series of slim, overlapping tales). But he could have dwelled instead on the sheer misanthropy of the book's limited perspective. In many ways it perfectly illustrates the problems, and even the crisis, in modern British fiction: arid, overbred and, most crucially, with nothing to say. While modern American fiction gloriously explores the consequences of the "war on terror", political turmoil and the feverish life of an ever-changing suburban and western culture, English fiction, or a certain type of it, is stuck in north London, preoccupied with ageing-male ennui and artistic envy. This is the world of latter-day Julian Barnes, or Martin Amis.

In a ridiculous cover blurb, Ian McEwan describes Raine as “incapable of a dull thought”, but, were it true, this would be a pity, for more dullness might have created the verisimilitude to make a convincing narrative, rather than a series of dinner-party observations dressed up as fiction. Some of these are so unoriginal as to make one wonder if he is being deliberately cliched, such as a discussion of Stephen Dedalus’s theory about real tragedy, or that hoary old story about Laurence Olivier asking the Method-frustrated Dustin Hoffman if he had ever just tried acting. The characters here could be interchangeable, the men mostly hoary old goats and the women blunt-talking, mannish and invariably flat-chested. One feels that such men, and male writers, might be threatened by a full-chested woman.

There are sloppy repetitions, such as a character’s appearance being compared to that of someone with Down syndrome – the book is obsessed with appearances – even though a much larger sequence later deals specifically with Down syndrome, a sequence in which, in the context of the book’s laconic atmosphere, you hope it will be treated with sensitivity. It is – just about.

There are good lines here, as we’d expect, given Raine’s abilities, and most of these concern the qualities of longing and heartbreak that the novel was supposed to address (instead of actually being endlessly about sex). One passage describes how “whenever Frazer thought about her, he was his own raw quick, both pained and pleasured, unforgiving and unhealed, unable to help himself, unable to stop. Odd, isn’t it, how his impaired present inserts itself into these memories.”

Such passages are rare, however. Instead we have banalities such as “her laugh, she found, was multilingual, a kind of Esperanto”. Note the “she found”. It’s like the man who “didn’t know his wife. He couldn’t know his wife. At that stage, she didn’t know herself either”. And this is the problem: the book is just so writerly and contrived. The nuggets of observation and word play that shine in the minimalism of poetry are here, in the space of a novel, exposed as just that: ill-fitting shiny baubles, which never let you forget that the author Craig Raine is right there, constantly shining his gems.

Many of these are so clearly designed to shock or provoke – a ginger stump is likened to a thalidomide limb – that it reminded me of the sort of writing I used to do in my early 20s, springing forth those “arresting” images. There’s nothing wrong with meeting your heroes, as Patrick Marber will attest, but if they are accomplished poets one should be very wary of encouraging them to write novels.

Eamon Delaney is a novelist and the author of Breaking the Mould: A Story of Art and Ireland, published by New Island