Stuff
by Martin Rowson
336pp, Jonathan Cape, £17.99

At first, as I became progressively gripped by this memoir, I kept asking myself what it was about. These days, I expect memoirs to be about something definite and marketable - being unhappy, say, or good at football, or suddenly famous. But here the author comes across as a rather decent, slightly old-fashioned chap who happens to have been adopted. He went to a public school, then Cambridge, and later became a cartoonist. Then his parents died. Then he started clearing out their house.

Looking back at the experience of reading his book, I find myself thinking of being in a musty antique shop, full of ancient things that slightly give you the creeps, but which also fill you with powerful, yearning nostalgia. Rowson starts off in his dead parents' house, in which he finds endless clocks, and old-fashioned milk-bottles, and also bottles full of horse blood, and a headless skeleton. The skeleton had been used in a teaching hospital - Rowson's father was a virologist. The horse blood was an environment for the cultivation of viruses.

So Rowson starts looking at these relics, and thinking about what they mean. And meanwhile, the reader begins to think about death, how it catches people before they've had a chance to put their things in order. Here is a book, then, which is partly about old, rotting possessions, and also about death. It makes you think of things, animate and inanimate, all coming together, under one roof, and then all falling apart and sinking back into the dust.

The house in question is in Stanmore, and Rowson brilliantly describes his childhood memories of the place, a 1960s suburb still stuck in the 50s. This is one of his themes - that the 70s were much more like the 60s of our collective memory, just as the 50s were much more like the 30s, and so on. This is because we tend to remember the avant-garde, whereas most of us live in what he calls the "garde". One of the many good things about this book is that it is resolutely un-trendy.

The narrative is jumbled, like a Tarantino film - we enter the story after Rowson's parents have died, and we are drawn towards the circumstances of their deaths, somehow never being far away from death; the book manages to give you that heightened, jerky sense of time you get around hospitals and funerals. The text is laced with bedside vigils and final moments - the fitting and also absurd things that always happen when people die. But do memories die as well as people?

"Viewed from the present," Rowson writes, "the past is refracted through too many prisms and lenses picked up on the journey ever to be seen quite clearly." Of course, memories, as he explains, are tricky things to pin down - when you remember something, you might well be accessing your last memory of that thing, rather than the thing itself, and, what's more, having been re-remembered, it might subtly change again. There's a very moving sequence in which Rowson describes his stepmother's last weeks when, aware of her impending death, she trawls "the landscape of her memories", looking for new versions of old things as well as comforting ones.

We meet Rowson's adoptive father, Kenneth, a beautifully realised character, with his dry wit and his fondness for teasing jokes and odd pieces of advice. He was disabled as a child, walked with a limp, lost a son in infancy and a wife before he was middle-aged, wrote heart-rending poetry and died of a pulmonary embolism. As a reader, you will warm to him, even love him. And then there's Rowson's mother, whose funeral he was too young to attend, and his stepmother, whom he visits on her deathbed in a scene that will make some readers want to cry. Finally, we catch a glimpse of Rowson's birth mother. He traces her. He is summoned to an office in Clapham, where he is told that she is dead.

So we move from death, through death, towards death. His friend Jon died tragically young. On his deathbed, Rowson read him an essay on the Rolling Stones by Nick Kent, and captures the strangeness of the moment very well. He is a sensitive writer, capable of great subtlety and nuanced emotional gear-changes. In the end, what does he tell us? That everybody we know will die, and that memory, too, will die, if it's not already dead. All we are ever left with is the stuff - in his case, the clocks, the headless skeleton and the bottles of horse blood.

· William Leith's The Hungry Years is published by Bloomsbury