David Mitchell's many admirers, as well as his many critics, may be surprised by the structure he has chosen for his new novel.

His last book, the award-winning and best-selling Cloud Atlas, consisted of six tales from the past, present and future, each wrapped around the next like a Russian doll.

2001's Number9Dream - which, like Cloud Atlas, was nominated for the (Man) Booker Prize - revelled in dreamlike diversions of incident and tone, breaking off at intervals to imitate movies, computer games and, at one point, the voice of a Japanese submariner from the Second World War. Ghostwritten, Mitchell's debut from 1999, contained 10 loosely-connected stories which took the reader from Tokyo to London by way of New York, St Petersburg and Mongolia.

However, with Black Swan Green, Mitchell has reined in his formal trickery, confining himself to the one playful touch of producing 13 chapters that cover 13 months in the life of a 13-year-old boy. In a straightforward manner, Black Swan Green details a year in the life of Jason Taylor, a fairly unremarkable teenager and aspiring poet growing up in a village in Worcestershire in 1982, dealing with school bullies, rowing parents and an annoying big sister about to escape to university.

If Mitchell intended to test his own writing and his ability to hold the reader's attention without jumping wildly from setting to setting and character to character, the exercise has not been a complete success. This is partly because the figures he concentrates on in Black Swan Green - principally Jason's family and his somewhat interchangeable army of classmates - are no match for the vivid and bewitching characters he has produced before.

After three novels of fearless invention, it had seemed as though Mitchell had escaped the writer's compulsion to mine his own life story for material, but Black Swan Green reads like an autobiographical first novel. The book is often interesting when it deals with Jason's stammer, a speech impediment which also affected Mitchell and which causes his narrator to "think one sentence ahead, and if you see a stammer-word coming up, alter your sentence so you won't need to use it." Jason's biggest fear is that his stammer will become public knowledge at school and he will be labelled "Stutterboy".

There are other things Jason hides from his school friends. He writes poetry under the name "Eliot Bolivar", and delivers it to the parish magazine in secret (his friends would think it was "gay"). Mitchell is particularly good on the shifting allegiances and precarious social status of childhood, explaining in the first chapter why some kids are called by their first names, some by "sort of respectful nicknames like 'Yardy'", some by their surnames and some by "piss-take nicknames like Moran Moron or Nicholas Briar who's Knickerless Bra. It's all ranks, being a boy, like the army." The stock of Jason's popularity rises and falls a number of times during the course of the book.

Mitchell has a good eye for detail. Describing his father greeting his brother-in-law, Jason notes that "each was wearing the jersey the other'd given him for Christmas" - and he lovingly recreates the slang of Black Swan Green's schoolkids, which usually seems to involve an inventive synonym for "homosexual". The details of the 80s - John Craven's Newsround, Angel Delight, koi carp - are recounted so enthusiastically that at first the book threatens to subside into the kind of 80s fetishising which might warrant an appearance from Stuart Maconie. However, the references are more smoothly worked-in than they were in the early version of chapter one which appeared in Granta magazine in 2003.

The backdrop of the Falklands War provides successful passages detailing the rush of patriotism which grips the village (Jason even keeps a scrapbook), and Thatcherism is always a subtle presence, with passing mentions of school dinner services being put out to tender and the introduction of anti-union measures.

Mitchell's writing is always hugely readable, but it is hard to judge its quality here since he has taken pains to imitate the sometimes whimsical voice of a teenager with literary pretensions. The book is studded with Jason's insights and revelations, which can be well-put - "Magnets don't need to understand magnetism," he says on being attracted to a girl - but are more often dull: "Listening to houses breathe makes you weightless"; "Music's a wood you walk through."

Having got this slice of autobiography out of his system, hopefully Mitchell will now return to more unfamiliar territory. He recently told The Bookseller: "In my next book I'll write something as distant from Jason Taylor as I possibly can." Good. Staying so close to home seems to have inhibited his imagination.

Black Swan Green is published on May 8

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