Michael Frayn hasn't published a novel for 16 years, but it's immediately clear from his new one that he hasn't lost the trick of it. After so long a lay-off some self-consciousness might have been expected, but Frayn has turned this potential liability to advantage by making it an essential part of his subject. The Trick of It is, among other things, an essay on itself, but the reflexive element is saved from a merely formal aridity by its comic brio and its uneasy respect for human mysteriousness.

In his early days as humourist—or satirist, as the term then was—Michael Frayn relied heavily on his acuteness of ear and ventriloquial command of voice. The recognisable, betraying tone, the give-away use of current idiom, the patent, clichéd insincerities of the characters in his old Guardian and Observer pieces survive well (as a recent series of broadcasts of them by Martin Jarvis demonstrated) because the words are so alertly voiced; they ask to be spoken. It's not surprising that Frayn has subsequently written so much for the theatre, both as playwright and as translator. From the ingratiating patter of the likes of Rollo Swaveley (the well-known public relations consultant), Christopher Smoothe (Minister of Chance and Speculation), and the Bishop of Twicester, to the more extended self-justifications of social comedy was a natural progression. Nevertheless Frayn was always wedded to print, and to parody. Towards the End of the Morning (1967), the most substantial of his novels, was about a journalist (admittedly one trying to break into television), and many of his most speakable lines have written antecedents of one kind or another.

The Trick of It is an epistolary novel, and the letters which make it up hover—as letters between close friends do—between the written and the spoken. The narrative voice is immediately engaging: colloquially spontaneous, casually witty, effortlessly audible and therefore readable. Since the hero is a university lecturer he knows about writing, but he is not knowing about it in the Bradbury-Lodge manner. The book is relatively free from the arch allusiveness that academic writers find hard to resist—and their academic readers not to enjoy—and its tone isn't exclusive. The term ‘Post-Structuralist’ is reserved to describe the narrator's style of driving. He naturally has some professional habits, such as referring to novel titles in the abbreviated form conventional in footnotes (so that Falling down Duke Street becomes FDDS), and he is predictably paranoid about rival specialists in his field. Since his letters are written to a Germanist chum who has emigrated to Australia to write his great work on Mörike, the Middle Years, a certain amount of academic shop is to be expected, but it isn't paraded.

Richard's field is the novelist he refers to as JL, the author of some bizarrely plotted but fundamentally serious novels whom he has long regarded as a major writer of our time-or majwoot, as he comes to call her. He knows everything about her that can be found in the public domain, but has unconsciously resisted the idea of actually meeting her—and, as events turn out, rightly so. When he does invite her down to talk at his university, she seems so ordinary as to be extraordinary. He is as knocked out by her in the no longer young flesh as he was on the much pondered page. At their first strange and fatal intimacy, however, he discovers that she is wearing a peach bra with white knickers. This strikes him as a serious discrepancy, an early sign of the disconcerting truth as opposed to the imagined ideal. Further shocks follow; the closer he gets to her inner life the more unguessable and unglossable it becomes. He has to negotiate the unsuspected modern taboo—brilliantly discovered by Frayn—against going to bed with an author on your reading list.

At first he hopes that their marriage will foster his role as guardian of her genius, but it only serves to underline the separateness of her writing self. It seems wonderful to have the chance of being inscribed in her oeuvre because of his part in the life which must nourish it, but the prospect becomes less enchanting when it becomes clear that that will only be on her terms, if at all. The sense of privilege brought by their association gives way to the bitterness of exclusion: She has never read a word of what he has written about her, and ignores his advice to offset the imaginative extravagance of her new work by adding a distancing element of ironic self-awareness. He even tries to assuage his jealousy of her creativity by starting to write himself, but it doesn't work. She can and does write anywhere and all the time—London, the provinces, even Abu Dhabi, where they end up. He has, however, to recognise that he hasn't the trick of it. But if he feels that because of her his life has run into the sand, she equally complains that he has led her into a stony and desolate place. Author and exegete have reached an impasse about which it is no longer possible to be amusing.

What JL hoped to get out of the marriage isn't and can't be made clear since she has no independent narrative presence, but it hardly seems to matter what happens to her since she transubstantiates everything through the blue Swan ink in her Waterman pen. She not only appropriates some of Richard's neglected relations, who become unexpectedly interesting under her unblinking gaze, but even begins to write a book on—and therefore to take over—the life of his mother. His hopes that her work will develop and mature under his care are baffled by her creative intransigence. She has no use for his ‘light ludic touch’. Nothing could be less Jamesian than the tone of Frayn's protagonist, but in the end he finds himself ‘sold’ in a thoroughly Jamesian way: his attempt to intrude the critical intelligence into the creative life has become entirely self-defeating.

It's perhaps a matter of more than literary significance. The idea that, given life's recalcitrance, it's not enough to be well-meaning is a recurring one in Michael Frayn's work. However anxious one is to think and do the right thing—the reasonable decent, liberal thing—what one comes up against may simply not be amenable to rational argument and good intentions. Such bafflement has obvious comic potential at a sod's law level, but it can also be a cause for deeper dismay. This underlying apprehension surfaces in a rather melodramatic way in the demonic character in Frayn's play Benefactors. In The Trick of It the narrator's life is virtually deconstructed by his exposure to a force that may be ‘creative’ but which is also obstinate, obscure, and even threatening. The book is more of a fable about literature's ambivalent power than a manifestation of it, and it is too modest to offer itself as a major work of our time, but there is more to it than at first meets the eye and ear.