Working Class Zero by Rob Payne, HarperCollins, 264 pages, $19.95

This is Torontonian Rob Payne's second novel, a sequel of sorts to Live By Request, his debut last year. In Request, 26-year-old bartender and aspiring musician Jay Thompson does his best to find love and fame. Near the end of Request, Jay notes: "Life proceeds at its mundane pace. As usual, I've made no significant changes. But I'm thinking about it."

Zero rejoins Jay Thompson at age 30. His ability to convert thought into action still suffers. Jay has spent the four years since Request working at an office job he hates, and it's a bad sign when such a large span of time can be accurately summarized within the space of a fortune cookie slip. Jay's lack of ambition is frustrating and acts to cancel out his character's likeability factor. As an affable guy in his mid-20s, his dithering in Live By Request made sense. Here it grates. One wonders why Payne has decided to build a franchise around such a timid, often bland character.

Granted, the life of a Working Class Zero can be zany. According to Jay, "This has been the strangest and most intense few weeks of my life: my relationship has faltered ... my father has been instructed to get his colon scoped, I've eaten Kentucky-fried tofu and a $9 salad, lusted after a co-worker and I'm due to go on stage at a dinner theatre this Friday posing as John Denver."

If this plotline reminds you of a Nick Hornby or Roddy Doyle novel, you'd be half-right. At one point, Jay peers through the song library of a file-sharing fellow named Smile2day and wonders "how a person can have Silverchair, Mariah Carey and the Jam in the same collection. That's like being a communist against trade unions." Here is Rob from Hornby's High Fidelity, arguing about music with his girlfriend Laura: "How can you like Art Garfunkel and Solomon Burke? It's like saying you support the Israelis and the Palestinians."

Zero is diet Hornby -- all the music and relationship pondering, with only half the insight. Observe a typical Payne moment of clarity: "Our collars might be white, but our outlooks are grey and our paycheques are most definitely lacking in green." Call this Low Fidelity.

Nothing really happens. Hornby novels are filled with Events: In High Fidelity, Laura leaves Rob. They both sleep with other people. Later, Laura's father dies. Hornby characters make huge mistakes and confront big crisises. Meanwhile, in Zero, Jay kinda flirts with a co-worker, sorta deals with his employment dissatisfaction and teeter-totters with various family reconciliations.

Payne described this kind of fiction -- his kind -- as "urban contemporary comedic writing" in an infamous Globe and Mail article last January. Denigrating the competent but dull historical fiction that we overproduce in this country, Payne argued for more "urban contemporary prose" -- which he describes as "sleek, unadorned and spiced with reference to pop culture, music and current affairs." Predictably, his insouciance made the CanLit dinosaurs squawk and roar.

The assumption underpinning his Yonge Turk Manifesto was that "Rob Payne will save us from our stodgy, bleak, rural selves." However, not being CanLit doesn't automatically make a novel good.

Payne needs to tinker further with craft. At least one subplot is abandoned, never to be resolved. His homages are obvious. Compare the first sentence of Zero, which begins "My life is ticking away one subway token at a time ..." with this voice-over from the film Fight Club: "This is your life, and it's ending one minute at a time."

Some of his set pieces run too long. In trying to convey the banality of office life, Payne oversucceeds with an extended scene at a pay-as-you-weigh salad bar. When he tries to turn the food court shuffle into a running gag, he lacks the requisite deftness. Other scenes, such as a bonding moment between Jay and his father-in-law, could go on longer.

Payne also mollycoddles his characters, afraid to allow his dialogue to do any heavy lifting. Usually much of the joy and pleasure this sort of novel offers is to be found in long passages of crisp conversations. Instead, Payne's constant explication serves to stymie momentum and development, like too much voiceover in a movie.

Finally, his attempts at parodying the language of office bureaucracy -- a pen drawer is "implement cargo space" -- are luke-warm jokes about a tired topic. His co-workers, meanwhile, are two-dimensional -- someone from Filing is described as having the stature and skin tone of Miss Piggy -- yet Jay's friends are three-dimensional. The shifts between cartoony and serious are jarring.

Zero does contain some smart, delicate moments -- "Divorce is a Halloween candy apple filled with razor blades" -- although fewer than Live By Request. Payne appears less interested in quality than quantity, given that only a year has passed between books.

If Payne is comfortable workshopping his novels in public, he should continue apace. If he wants to produce contemporary urban fiction with a shelf life, he should bury Jay Thompson and invest an extra year in his next novel.