An acquaintance once told me about being at a literary party and falling into conversation with someone about a novel that had recently been published. After they had been discussing it for a while, he asked the woman whether she had read the book in question. “Oh yes,” she replied, a little defensively, “though not personally.”

One knows exactly what she meant. There are certain books that generate such a flutter of media chitchat that by the time one has laboured through the profiles, opinion pieces, reviews (such as this one) and diary columns, one really does feel as though one has read the damn thing - although not personally.

Wetlands is a case in point. The author is a 30-year-old British-born presenter on Viva, “the German equivalent of MTV”. (The publisher has downplayed the fact that the novel was written in German by relegating the translator from his traditional place on the title page to the back - presumably for fear that our distaste for things foreign might damage sales.) The book has already produced a media buzz on the Continent (go on YouTube and you can see Charlotte Roche being archly interrogated by an elderly German version of Jonathan Ross) and has started to do the same here.

The cause of the fuss is the novel's extreme obscenity - though “obscenity” doesn't quite catch the particular, pungent flavour of the thing. “Grunginess” is nearer the mark. It opens with the narrator, 18-year-old Helen, lying in a hospital bed awaiting an operation on her infected anus. By the end of page two, we have learnt all about her recurring problem with haemorrhoids, and also about how this has never interfered with (indeed, may have enhanced) her enjoyment of anal sex. “Hygiene's not a major concern of mine,” she tells us. And so, as she lies there, she tells us how she likes to wipe her genitals on the urine-soaked seats of public lavatories, to eat the pus she has squeezed from her zits and to ...well, perhaps that's enough for a family newspaper.

In truth, the most obscene thing about Wetlands is its cynicism of conception and banality of execution. In interviews, Roche has put a high-minded gloss on it, portraying her novel as a feminist critique of health-andhygiene fascism. In fact, its ideological position is closer to the kind of extended whine familiar to any parent who has asked their teenage daughter to tidy her bedroom. Helen's idea of an incisive political gesture is to leave bloody, infected rags in the hospital lift, relishing the outrage of the nurses who will have to clear up after her. In a world where millions cry out for clean water, one doubts that this is the beginning of a global protest movement.

None of this would matter, of course, if the writing were witty or entertaining. It is, however, humourless and flat, with the narrative frequently treading water while the author scrapes the barrel for the next oh-so-shocking piece of scatology: “I've already sprayed myself with pepper spray - also just because I wanted to know what it felt like. The brand I used was called Knockout . . . The stuff really agitates your mucous membranes. I'm bored here. I can tell from the thoughts in my head. I'm trying to entertain myself with my own old stories.” There's plenty more like that.

For all its faux-outrageous coating, the weak and thinly imagined narrative of Wetlands is conventional and conservative. Virtually all that happens in a plotline worthy of the ickiest made-for-television weepie is that Helen prolongs her stay in hospital in the hope that her divorced parents will reunite at her bedside; at the end, Mills-&-Boon-like, she falls into the arms of the male nurse who has been looking after her.

Wetlands was written solely with an eye to creating a media tizzy. In the case of some books that “one has read though not personally”, there is actually something worthwhile behind the brouhaha. Not here, though. Believe me.

Wetlands by Charlotte Roche
Fourth Estate £12.99 pp220

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