Matthew Reynolds's second novel was launched with a competition in which couples were invited to send pictures of themselves to appear on the cover. What they may not have realised was that their snaps would be superimposed over the image of a rotting apple. But the reference to original sin, along with the Miltonic title and the fact that the action takes place in a street called Eden Grove, gives a clue as to Reynolds's guiding inspiration.

The opening scene occurs not in a paradisal garden so much as hell-on-wheels. Philip and his partner Sue are at a standstill in their car: "a VW Golf 1.6 Tdi Blue-motion, built 26 months and 13 days before, in Wolfsburg, on the river Aller, the arrow-straight Aller, where perch dart and poplars flutter, though Philip had bought it only the other week". Their lack of movement allows Reynolds to allocate several paragraphs to an inventory of the surrounding flora and fauna: "An early fox pads by, ears up, head a-twitch. A late mosquito drifts staggeringly towards its burrow. A pipistrelle flits ..." By the time we get to the micro-biological activity of the leaf mulch it is apparent that we could be stuck in this jam for quite some time.

Philip and Sue are an inoffensive couple in their early 20s, living in a rented home in the Home Counties, where he works as a locum in a local practice and she commutes to her job as a curator in a London art gallery. They're still at the stage where their first action on arrival at the office is to open a Skype window to the other's place of work; and the narrative is mostly concerned with their professional lives. Philip muses on the palliative role of the modern GP, while Sue has a crisis to solve when two egomaniacal artists cancel their show and she and a colleague are required to put together an exhibition exploring the concept of anonymity.

Reynolds's omnivorous eye bears some resemblance to the painstaking prose poetry of Jon McGregor's debut, If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things. Yet if McGregor irradiated the everyday into something numinous, Reynolds risks slowing the narrative to a crawl. The characters cannot set off down the road until we have been issued with the names and ages of the workmen who laid the pavement. The deathless prose of the Oxford Handbook of Clinical Medicine even works its way into the bedroom where Sue, "her breath becoming a moan as endorphinergic and morphinergic mechanisms spluttered into life", experiences possibly the most pedantic orgasm ever.

Reynolds introduces some enjoyable ancillary characters, including a pair of prima-donna artists whose Tweedledum-and-Tweedledee mode of speech is so waspish you wish there was more of it; and much of Philip's clinic hours are taken up with a cancer patient whose consulting-room arias account for some of the most eloquent passages of the book. But the self-absorption of the central couple makes them appear hardly any less inert at the end of the novel than they were at the beginning: "Philip was ballasted with unhappiness, it was as though the lower perimeter of his body were dissolving with unhappiness, as though he were gluily disappearing into the sofa with unhappiness". For all the hints and parallels with Eden, Philip and Sue's journey from suburban complacence to slightly diminished suburban complacence doesn't really support the Miltonic frame of reference. Ultimately Reynolds' novel is less Paradise Lost than Purgatory Maintained.