He gets away with stuff that would sink most writers. He's good at the aimless years of adolescence, the groping, the relentless search for parties and alcohol, but Chuck Berry managed to do it in two minutes 40 in "No Particular Place To Go" and Matt Thorne did it better in Child Star.

There's also the question of what exactly we're reading. Karl Ove Knausgaard's books are billed as novels, but they do feature a writer called Karl Ove whose life bears an uncanny, methodical similarity to Knausgaard's. While memoirs have always been subject to sexing up and indeed outright fiction, and novels are often subject to legal action because of the weight of reality they carry, there's a difference in the reader's expectations.

In a memoir the reader will tolerate a certain amount of unthrilling detail and tedium because it's meant to be a record of what happened: there's a pact that this dull stuff is there to shore up the important stuff. The pact that comes with the novel is different: I take your money and I give you pleasure. Of course, there is an irony in that the modern novel was conjured up by Daniel Defoe, who failed as a forger of memoirs.

It's also ironic that Knut Hamsun was the writer who torpedoed the many-paged, furniture-filled 19th-century novel with Hunger (1890) and created the tone for 20th-century classics such as Albert Camus's L'Etranger and J.D.Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye, while his compatriot is bringing back the clutter. While Knausgaard has inherited the absolute egocentricity of Hamsun's narrator, we also get the page-padding techniques of Dickens, Melville and Balzac again. It's as if Knausgaard was being paid by the word and his bank account is massively overdrawn. Every 60 seconds of Knausgaard's life seems to receive its adoration. Close examination of the everyday can provide insights, and to some extent that's the main aim of literature, but not constant close examination. Constant close examination of reality might be the writer's job, but it's not the reader's. Wasn't it Proust who said the man who remembers everything remembers nothing?

The last quarter of A Death in the Family which deals with the death of Karl Ove's father is a fascinating read as long as you don't mind uncut bleakness. The second volume, A Man in Love (Harvill Secker, £8.99), sees Knausgaard pouring out his life in even more excessive detail and he is, if nothing else, indisputably the poet laureate of child care. No one will ever write a more thorough account of a children's party, and Knausgaard will probably be an idol to anyone with toddlers.

Just when you hope that he has wrung his childhood bone dry, the third volume, Boyhood Island, revisits his summer holidays. Perhaps my reserves of patience had simply been depleted by this point, but, for me, this was by far the weakest book.

Should you read Knausgaard? His work is very, very slow and very, very little happens. Let me write that again in case you don't believe me or it didn't fully register. It's very very, very slow and very, very little happens. In fact if I write that again, you'll get a sense of Knausgaard's style: it's very, very slow and very, very little happens. And just when you think I won't write that again, as homage to Knausgaard, I will; it's very, very slow and very, very little happens.

There is a soothing charm to the gentle pace, rather like an excessively relaxed soap opera or a secret webcam in someone's home. If you'd enjoy watching someone washing their dishes or wondering exactly where to place their toothbrush, then this is for you. I won't be tucking into volume four.