Flamingo, stg£13

Writing about popular culture is of a notoriously uneven quality. For every writer capable of repeatedly hitting the nail on the head, there are numerous others who flail around in a swamp of indulgent theorising and undergraduate posturing.

Michael Bracewell, unfortunately, falls into the second category. Although his prose his readable, and some of his judgements astute, a weakness for pretension and a bloated structure damage The Nineties beyond repair.

This is Bracewell's seventh book. Its aim is to trace the cultural currents that defined life during the last decade of the 20th century.

It sounds like a good idea, but chapter titles like The Barbarism of the Self-Reflecting Sign epitomise the inaccessible and pompous approach the author adopts.

Some strengths are clear. The book opens breezily, with Bracewell wryly recollecting the mindless way in which, during the early 90s, every emerging trend was labelled as `the new rock 'n' roll'. He has a gift for amusing observations.

He writes that, "as a wit, dandy, popular socialist and homosexual martyr, Oscar Wilde would have been the perfect chat-show guest for the late 1990s -- somewhere between Sir Elton John and Eddie Izzard."

He mocks television adverts for financial services in which bright young things would "walk through the walls of their loft conversions to prove that they controlled their cash".

Some more serious, pithy comments are also made. Bracewell notes how middle-class artists went to great lengths to disguise their social background to avoid any stigma of uncoolness. He explores the way in which `reality TV' programmes presented dysfunctionality as authenticity.

But Bracewell never synthesises these worthwhile points into a longer, coherent argument. The Nineties often seems directionless. The reader must repeatedly wade through horrendously overwrought descriptive passages and acres of bluster.

The most accessible parts of the book are the interviews with which it is dotted, but these fail to reveal anything significant about the subjects.

Bracewell is particularly poor with female interviewees. He replaces his highbrow tone with one of Hello-style obsequiousness.

When Ulrika Jonsson tells him that she has only recently replaced her Fiat Panda with a more upmarket car, Bracewell remarks that, "this little fact says a lot about the woman".

Tracey Emin's laugh sounds like those "you usually hear coming out of a phone box when three teenage girls are in there daring one another to ring up boys". This, as with Ulrika's Fiat, apparently "speaks volumes about the woman".

The Nineties' most infuriating weakness is simple. Bracewell is colossally pretentious. There is enough material in these pages to fill Private Eye's Pseud's Corner for a year. His meditation on the importance of motorways in the British consciousness is a prime example: "There is something about the minimalism of the motorway that both refines its aesthetic appeal, and -- less enjoyably, perhaps -- informs the experience of using it.

"On joining the motorway, we enter a territory stripped of everything save function.

"When you try to pin down the status of the motorway, the service area and their vague, indeterminate hinterland, you are faced with a version of Gertrude Stein's pronouncement: `there's no `there' there'."

Execrable passages like this crop up so often that the response engendered is one of slack-jawed amazement. Between a consideration of American teen pop and an interview with Quentin Crisp, the author takes two pages to describe his own musings while sitting in a rotating Manhattan cocktail lounge: "Infantilism and old age -- now there's a topic to toy with, as you order another glass -- generous now, with amiability, comfortable and content, serene in the poetry of the moment, as chug, chug, chug, the cocktail bar rotates. . . What was it Quentin Crisp had written in response to Liberty's `huddled masses yearning to breathe free'?"

In a perfect world, writing a passage like that would be a hanging offence.

The best aspects of The Nineties glimmer only momentarily. The bulk of the book varies in quality between mediocre and appalling. Even its essential premise is never carried through -- for all Bracewell's apparent concern with contemporary culture, his acuity is mostly reserved for figures from the 1970s and 1980s. He offers decent appraisals of people as disparate as the Two Ronnies and punk rocker Howard Devoto, but nothing is revealed about the 1990s in the process.

This had the potential to be an interesting, insightful book. It isn't.