There haven't been many novels yet about austerity.

When will today's Angry Young Men emerge? Instead of the mine and the mill, where are the dispatches from the call centre and the charity shop?

In Real Life captures the frustration and depression of low-paid work but not via crusading anger. Instead, it quietly evokes the texture of life, following John Updike's rule of "giving the mundane its beautiful due". The reader is made to feel "the cold, dimpled top of the postbox". There is a "pair of Mickey Mouse socks with a hole in the heel" and the stirring of cheap stews with a stained wooden spoon.

The texture, flavour and heft of things are strongly evoked but often at the expense of plot and character which are required to prop up the weight of those elements. A thriller can be weak on character, and a psychological story may be thin on plot, but no novel can skimp on both, as this one proves.

The story comprises three narrative strands - accounts of Paul, Ian and Lauren, former university friends - and they loosely interconnect across the years to show how their youthful ambitions have been dented by real life.

Ian was in a band but suffered a mental breakdown. He has retreated to his sister's spare room, where he's forced to pawn his guitar and take low-paid work in a call centre. He spends his days conducting scripted, unnatural conversations and being monitored, chided and insulted whilst the Job Centre offers nothing but leaflets for depression counselling.

As Ian meanders between the sofa and the call centre, stripped of hope and his guitar, the novel often sags. There is no sense of momentum here, though this may be a way of capturing his aimlessness, of showing him as an everyman on whom we can project memories of our own youthful indecision and worry. However, it soon grows tedious as we watch him eat yet another Meal Deal in yet another lunch break.

Paul is also struggling. Sulky and pretentious, he was dumped by Lauren yet managed to publish a successful novel, but now finds himself unable to write another. He squanders his time and talent working as a tutor and slides into self-pity and a seedy affair with a student.

Bored and restless, Lauren ran off to Canada for a new life, where she strikes up an e-mail correspondence with Ian to ward off her loneliness. It develops into an online flirtation which abruptly ends when she meets a new man. But when her foreign adventure ends, she finds herself back home working in a charity shop, her days spent sorting CDs and chipped teacups.

Each character starts out with promise but is knocked off course by real life, finding themselves stuck in differing versions of austerity Britain, an unforgiving place for the young. As their lives intertwine, we anticipate some great denouement, but this never arrives.

You could argue that the novel is simply imitating life, which rarely has a neat resolution. But you could also argue that a novel has a duty to step above the banal. Life may imitate art, but must art imitate life?

However, there is some decent writing. Ian's depression lodges in his chest "as if he'd swallowed a shoe". A mobile phone illuminates a darkened room "like a cold blue candle". Yet these pleasant glints are dimmed by the grungy style of the dialogue. There may have been a conscious attempt to make the prose lumpen, as raw as the young characters themselves, but if the occasional clumsy writing was deliberate, it was a deliberation too far.

The author shifts between narrators, time-frames, points of view and the past and present tense, skipping across broken relationships, health scares, miserable jobs, poverty, affairs and depression. Nowhere does he drive his flag into the earth and declare that this is his territory, and ultimately this renders the novel fickle and wispy.