It is fitting that [The Trick of It] Michael Frayn's first novel for 16 years should explore the difficulty of writing fiction. Rather daunting for a reviewer, though, that it wittily deflates the business of literary criticism in the process.

When Frayn's hero, a lecturer in English, invites a female author whose book he teaches and reveres to give a talk to his students, he assumes she will be a disappointment in the flesh. But the visit ends up with the writer and the scholar in bed together. This—and the troubled relationship that ensues—is documented in a series of letters written by the lecturer to his friend in Australia.

Critically sophisticated and devilishly clever though he likes to think he is, our academic is confused. At last he is privy to his literary idol's personal life. In fact, he is part of it. Yet, to his dismay, he doesn't understand her books or her talent any better for knowing what colour her knickers are. And he's not sure whether to be crestfallen that she's only human (her knickers and her bra don't match) or resentful that she and her artistry (the eponymous “trick” of how she writes those damn books) retain such a mystique.

There are other problems: why, he asks, in his jokey, anguished letters, doesn't she write about him? He's hurt that their life together doesn't find its way into a novel—but feels invaded when she starts to write about his mother. “Her Omniscient Majesty doesn't know what went on inside my mother's head.” And why, since he is several times more intelligent than her, can he not write a novel? As he sets out to prove that “any bloody fool can do it”, one is reminded of Johnson's defence of critics: “You may scold a carpenter who has made you a bad table, though you cannot make a table. It is not your trade to make tables.”

This critic tries his hand at a bit of amateur woodwork and finds that his table won't stand up; the project has to be abandoned halfway through. His failed fictional efforts corroborate what seems a rather conservative response on Frayn's part to the question of how Great Art is made. The creative process is, we are encouraged to conclude, essentially mysterious. We may enjoy its results but we can never properly grasp how the rare breed of artist-magicians do it. Such Kenneth Clark-style reverence seems to me a bit dubious. I'm jolly impressed by people who makes tables but I wouldn't say the knack of furniture-making was unfathomable.

Perhaps, however, the final joke of this thoughtful and often very funny book has a demystifying point to make after all. The critic gives up trying to understand or emulate the novelist's je ne sais quoi. He has tried to pin the artist down—and lost. But if he is forever barred from grasping the trick of it, what, we may want to ask, are his scribblings doing, in an elegant book jacket, priced £11.95?