There's no denying that Reif Larson's The Selected Works of TS Spivet is a handsome volume; a novel beautifully presented, published, and illustrated with imagination and wit. The spindly maps and digressions are delightful, perfectly bringing to life Spivet's eclectic cartography, while the writing is that unashamedly confident, sure-of-its-own-blinding-intelligence brand of American fiction that I normally both adore and feel slightly humbled by.

And yet, for all this, the novel left me cold. Or more precisely I started off coolly towards it and got steadily frostier. No matter how clever, warm, witty or inventive Larson's book is – and it is undoubtedly all of these things – I couldn't help but think: not another bloody novel about a gifted child.

Since Mark Haddon found acclaim and massive sales with The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time, there has been a steady shift towards novels featuring narrators and characters acting well above their age bracket. Edward St Aubyn's Booker-nominated Mother's Milk, Adam Foulds's The Truth About These Strange Times, Gifted by Nikita Lalwani and Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer – to name just four – have made it a quirk of the literary mainstream that all children must be possessed of a scholar's vocabulary and the buzzing intellect of a professor of applied mathematics.

So much so, in fact, that all James Kelman had to do to remain defiantly anti-commercial was to write a novel called Kieron Smith, Boy, rather than Kieron Smith, Boy Genius.

It's not that these books are badly written necessarily, just that they seem to exist in a very remote universe. Child geniuses do not, usually, impinge on our daily life, so why have they become so disproportionately represented in recent fiction?

It could be that the gifted child is the true outsider of our times. Caught between the physical world of their peers and the intellectual realm of adulthood, they mirror the feelings of not quite belonging one can experience as one gets older. As such, readers can empathise with the conundrums and pitfalls that befall the prodigy. After all, it's probably Salinger – who always had a gimlet eye for an outsider – who practically invented the whole genre with his monumentally fucked up family of geniuses, the Glasses.

There is another argument that suggests that childhood is so complex now that the only convincing first-person way to write about it is by allowing an adult sensibility – and intelligence – to comment upon it. I mentioned this to an editor recently and he nodded, then said "Well perhaps, but I think mainly it's because it's easier." He was being mischievous, but he had a point. So long as your narrative has an internal logic, and the voice is consistent, the reader can have no real complaints about the veracity of the character. If it doesn't sound like one of the kids you see on the bus every day, well it's not supposed to, is it?

And while I can see this argument, it still doesn't help me engage with such characters. For example, when Spivet says "I had not really been listening to the particulars of their conversation, for this was a ritual of miscommunication they played out every night" all I feel – as Alan Partridge found when interviewing child genius Simon Fisher – is a distinct urge to throw the brat into a very deep, disused canal.

Personally I hope that The Selected Works of TS Spivet sells handsomely enough to reward the author's audacity, but not so well that another pack of child genius novels come orienteering into view. Can't we just have a few novels featuring normal, average children who don't understand the complexities of hydrostatics or the central thesis behind chaos theory? The Spivets of this world just make me feel stupid ...