Prejudice unconfirmed: yes, gentle reader, the title of Geoff Dyer's third is uniquely awful, and the book itself is wrapped in horrendously inappropriate Day-Glo covers. And yet behind the disco-biscuit trappings lurks a sly and subtle book; one in which next to nothing happens.

It's essentially a fancy middle-class conceit, this life of nice twentysomething middle-class English boys in Paris. Luke went there to write The Great Novel. (He didn't even start.) And Alex just went. They meet girls there too, because that's what they want and what they try to do. Nicole and Sahra. They drink, fight, fuck. They dance, drop acid and watch old movies. One couple splits, the other is still going strong: "Happiness is just the harmony between a person and the life they lead."

What this is, then, is one of those French movies about flighty young things who drink, fight and fuck too much. Something from that brilliant old veteran Eric Rohmer maybe, or more voguish youngsters. Like Desplechin's Ma Vie Sexuelle or Mimouni's delicious L'Appartment. Or, if you insist on looking at home, think Barbara Vine novels in which no one dies.

That last is a good comparison. Paris Trance has a mounting sense of tragedy, particularly in its countryside sojourns, that fails to deliver. Dyer might have named the novel for the city, but his writing is more at home in the suffocating pastoral landscapes where his prose has no focus except those couples. Within Parisian confines, the book reminds us of the slippery, surreal cities of his last, the Kafkian nightmare The Search.

Arguably the pudding is over-egged with movies (it's hard to buy Luke or Alex sitting through the slow majesty of L'Avventura or Red Desert), but that is really the only false step. In the end it's just such a shame that Dyer's publishers seem content to pitch this delicately scented and faintly disturbing novel at the boorish Irvine Welsh crowd. It really is too good.