And when did you last read your father?

Last night I was invited to dinner with Xinran. I might also have taken up the offer to attend drinks to mark the launch of Juan Gabriel Vasquez's new book. Or I could have just watched the football.

But no, I was duty manager on the late shift. Another evening of refund fraudsters, computer glitches and discourse with customers with the wit and social graces of autistic camels.

I wonder if there are people out there with cherished dreams of working in shops? Possibly not beyond the age of seven, until which time playing shop is considered educational, rather than indicating stunted ambition.

Mind you, I did have a young lad come into the shop not so long ago asking about jobs. He said that he was looking for the sort of position which would allow him to sit behind the desk and read most of the day. No wonder we get treated with such disdain by customers if that's what they think we do in bookshops. Although, if we didn't have to spend quite so long tidying up after people for whom the effort of returning a book to the shelf seems a ludicrous imposition, we'd probably get through a few chapters.

I've found myself thinking along these lines as I'm reading The Gone-Away World by Nick Harkaway, of which Heinemann were kind enough to send the most extravagantly packaged proof I've seen since HarperCollins did ones for William Dalrymple with incense sticks. They're hardbacks in boxes and they're numbered, after a fashion, with the names of each the 167 characters in the book. Mine's called Freddie after a character I have yet to encounter. I wonder if the allocation is anything other than random.

I'm particularly interested because I went to school with Nick. He was in the year above and we socialised occasionally. He was distinctly fey at the time, given to the wearing of fedoras and trench coats. Now I'm working in a bookshop, earning some pocket money on the side with some journalism, while he's sold his first novel for the usual 'significant' six-figure sum. Rather than an insignificant six-figure sum, I suppose.

He's also the son of John le Carré, which I should imagine is scarcely an impediment to finding oneself a publisher. But it would unfair to bear a grudge for that reason, not least because he will be dismissed as someone whose father's reputation and influence must have won him his publishng contract by every reviewer yet to write their own bestseller.

It would be pointless even to compare the two as writers, not least because Nick is on his first book while his father is nearly two dozen down the line. And because there's been forty years of fiction published since The Spy Who Came In From the Cold was written. But the book deserves to be judged on its own merits, no matter that there might be easy comparisons to make. To describe a book as an ersatz version of another or a hybrid of two is of value only in a marketing context, not in making a critical evaluation.

A hundred and fifty pages in, I'm enjoying myself, I think principally because the author so very clearly is. It's yarn of a story, whose direction I can't begin to predict. We have a main character - with no name that I've spotted yet - who is a student of radical thinking and some gorgeous pastiche of the martial arts, surrounded by impassioned scene-stealers. It's only frustrating because our 'hero' is a little too passive, too clinically perceptive, too much of a pivot for the book, rather than an engine.

In a way, it's a pop culture White Teeth. Like Zadie Smith, he's thrown so many ideas at it that not all of them can stick, but what remains is a novel of such bravado and brio that to fail to enjoy it would be the act of a spoilsport. (It's hundred pages shorter than his first draft too, apparently.) What remains is a glorious patchwork quilt with so many little scraps of narrative that needed a home like this, a novel which celebrates the wonder of storytelling and the sheer joy of harnessing the power of language.

We're only here for the beard

This week I was privileged enough, courtesy of Atlantic Books, to meet that doyen of alt.history and postcyberpunk and paradigm of pognophilia*, Neal Stephenson, in anticipation of the September publication of his new book, Anathem. The venue was a dim, slightly stuffy underground bar near Holborn, serving a range of tapas, including a sweaty cheeseboard featuring a cheese so odd I'm not unconvinced I may not have been confusing it with the bread.

(* I am aware that this is a gratuitous piece of sesquipedalianism, but anyone who wishes to accuse me of bombast and magniloquence at the slightest provocation would be right on the money.)

His editor remains the maverick's maverick Ravi Mirchandani, with whom I did work experience when he was at William Heinemann about nine years ago, when I still entertained furtive dreams of editing a Booker winner or two as an editor at Picador. I saw little of him while employed as an ersatz editorial assistant, since he tended to leave for lunch a little after eleven, leaving a trail of unreturned messages in his wake, and return about three days later.

He did, however, give me a proof copy of The House of Sand and Fog by Andre Dubus III, which remains one of my favourite novels. I also did a little work on Stephenson's Cryptonomicon, published at the end of my three weeks there; I seem to remember typing out long passages from the manuscript, although to what end I really couldn't say.

The author gave the obligatory sales pitch, an unenviable task even in front of a small audience naturally inclined toward him. Of course, being an author in today's market is almost as much about image and media skills as it is about being able to write; on publication, the usual cavalcade is de rigueur for all but the most established and stubborn writers. I'm told that the Richard & Judy team do bear in mind how an author will come across on the studio sofa when making their selections for the Book Club.

Anyway, after the usual toasts, I took the chance to speak with him. This is one of the perks of the book industry, compared to other media. I doubt I should get the chance to speak, at least without a PR's close supervision, to many stars if I worked in film or music. He seemed a little diffident, but, looking back, I do wonder if assailing him with questions about postapocalyptic dystopias in contemporary British literature - Jim Crace's The Pesthouse, Sarah Hall's The Carhullan Army, Nick Harkaway's The Gone Away-World - was a little unfair on him. I'm not as familiar with his work as I like to be when meeting an author, so perhaps I was trying too hard to assert my own credentials, for fear of looking ignorant.

Later, when I was saying my goodbyes to the Atlantic staff, he was deep in conversation with a couple of the Waterstone's buying team. I'm not very good interposing in conversations and tend to hand around awkwardly on the periphery for a few minutes until finally plunging in, usually at an utterly unwelcome juncture, so I decided to leave. As I started up the stairs, he came bounding after me, to thank me for coming.

This is a symptom of something I don't really like about the industry. When meeting head office buyers and the gentlemen of the press, an author is presumably given clear instructions to be as amenable and patient, since the impression given will probably end up having some bearing on the enthusiasm with which the book will be promoted. It's not so much the fact that one feels more inclined to support those one finds likeable, but the fact that the whole thing is a symptomatic of the author's being part of the package, part of the product.

We forget sometimes that a book is a commitment of considerable intensity on the part of the author - I know this is a generalisation and a romanticisation of the life of a writer - and that they are the one essential component, the spindle on which the whole wheel turns. Not even Mark Booth at Century - the man who publishes Katie Price and then recently had the gall to announce 'the death of the novel' - has yet devised a way to take that human element from the process, although I wouldn't be surprised if he spends his time these days coding algorithms to generate novels spontaneously.

The author is not a nuisance - certain persistent offenders demanding ongoing front-of-house presence against all sensible retail practice notwithstanding - but a cultural definer, standard bearer and baton passer. My nerves at meeting a senior member of the marketing team at a publisher whose lists I like owes themselves to the wish that I might make a good impression for professional reasons; nerves at meeting a favourite author are more profound and personal because I am responding in whatever small way I can to someone who has shaped my thoughts and has made me contemplate life afresh.

So, when Anathem is published this autumn, I hope the launch will be a celebration of the man, his ideas and his artistic vision.