While the rest of the world is fixated on China's steepening growth, the most recognised Chinese novelist is focusing on his American life. Ha Jin's fifth novel is less about the mainland than a migrant family's struggle to throw off as much of its culture and mindset as required to keep pace with the west. A Free Life was written in English and few of its 660 pages are set in China. The biggest departure for Ha Jin is the loss of the conciseness that won him the National Book Award and two PEN/Faulkner awards in the US.

A Free Life is baggy and wandering yet quotidian and apparently autobiographical in parts. The story doggedly follows the bookish and indecisive Nan Wu for 12 years from 1989, when he collects his son from the airport: Nan has been in Boston for the previous three years preparing a life for Taotao and his wife, Pingping.

He studies for a doctorate in political science while the couple maintain the house of a wealthy, complacent American family. Nan loses interest in politics and is fantasising about becoming a poet when his Chinese passport is cancelled shortly after he makes indiscreet remarks about the Tiananmen Square crackdown to mainland expatriates.

Forced to turn his back on China, Nan anxiously heads into the heart of the novel. The family move to cheaper Atlanta, buy a Chinese restaurant and take out a mortgage on a home. The intellectual, hesitant Nan thrives on learning how to cook and run a business. Old fears and fixations remain about health insurance, house payments and whether the woman who spurned Nan in China still thinks about him. Yet the reader's hopes rise that the protagonist will surprise himself by creating a completely new life - and a fresh line in fiction.

The character pities himself only occasionally for failing to work on his poetry after 14 hours a day in the restaurant, but before long he's led astray by the most corrupting characters a novel can introduce: poets, literary critics, social commentators and publishers.

Pakistani writer Mohsin Hamid, who reached the Booker shortlist this year, told the Sunday Morning Post a few months ago that migrant authors often need the security of a second career before they can write. They tend to live in large, expensive cities and are much less able than others to retreat to families or friends in cheaper regional areas. That practical involvement in the world can help such writers mint unique views.

Ha Jin flirts with this more interesting, pragmatic writing life for Nan before succumbing to romantic notions of artistic existence. It's all or nothing for Nan: the fulfilment he found in new skills and challenges is dismissed as an excuse for his fear of devoting himself to poetry.

It seems no accident that as Nan pines for the writer's life, the cliche count rises and the novel loses shape amid digressions that lead nowhere and end abruptly.

Ha Jin has a created a linear epic. However, in outlining his central character's literary obsession the author's poetic skill suffers, leaving a vast collection of incidents in the migrant life rather than ideas driven by narrative.