In his debut novel, Friction, Stockport-based writer Joe Stretch memorably chronicled the desolate lives of various sexual inadequates and deviants in Manchester. In his second, Wildlife, he turned his satirical gaze on the social networking proclivities of another set of manic twentysomethings. The Adult very much feels like the third in a trilogy: Stretch is still adeptly picking apart the dichotomies of glass-towered-yet-grimy 21st-century Manchester, still finding a kind of morbid normality in perversion.

This time, however, Stretch's focus is broader, taking in 20 years of Jim Thorne's life from 1989 to 2009, as he tries to make sense of a world where his family are famous but his dad is a videogaming recluse. There's a wonderful scene in which Jim's sister displays her Tracey Emin-inspired art show, and his mother says it all at the novel's end when she ponders that "celebrity is the west's only big idea".

So it's a real shame that there's a lack of a satisfying narrative. Essentially, Jim just grows up, sometimes a wry observer to the madness around him, sometimes just as odd himself. And because Stretch is so keen to note everything from Global Hypercolour T-shirts to Grand Theft Auto, The Adult threatens to become merely a timeline for a nostalgic thirtysomething – rather than the insightful state-of-the-nation novel it sometimes threatens to be.