Twenty years later, a comparison with some of his Granta peers is instructive. Like his friend Salman Rushdie, Amis has come to epitomise the writer as celebrity. Like his ex-friend Julian Barnes (their falling-out helped inspire The Information), he has been increasingly drawn to journalism and other non-fiction. And, unlike Ian McEwan, Pat Barker or Kazuo Ishiguro, he can no longer be considered as first and foremost a novelist. That is why Yellow Dog is awaited so eagerly, and with such sharpened knives. If this were a western, now is the scene when rival novelists and critics look up from their tables, pens poised mid-sentence, as a grizzled Amis enters the saloon with a dangerous glint in his eye and a raging thirst.

. . .

The novel begins with 47-year-old writer and actor Xan Meo bidding farewell to his American wife Russia and their little daughters as he heads out for a drink at a north London bar. His wife prolongs the goodbye, as women do: "Men shouldn't mind this. Being kept waiting is a moderate reparation for their five million years in power...". At the bar, he orders a cocktail called a Dickhead and retires to the garden, where he gets coshed on the head by mysterious assailants: "Xan Meo went to hospital. Male violence did it."

His cranial blow causes enfeeblement and reversion to a more primitive masculinity. He lapses into cockney villain-speak, lusts after every woman he sees and makes macho pronouncements about food ("Seafood is bullshit. I want meat"). His baby daughter cries when he goes near her; his four-year-old treats him like "a moderately intriguing family friend". Russia mourns the considerate husband he used to be and resists his constant, fumbling attempts at sex.

There are subplots involving the British king, Henry IX, whose teenage daughter seems to have been caught up in a porn film, and a tabloid hack called Clint Smoker who writes the psychotically laddish "Yellow Dog" column in the Morning Lark ("So some so-called 15-year-old is crying 'rape' after a bit of fun in a ditch with an older lad"). Smoker, a sexual inadequate with small genitalia, gets involved in an e-mail romance with someone signing herself as "k8", ie. Kate, whose text-spelt messages to him become 2ruly gr8ing 2 read. Interspersed through the novel, unconnected to its principal action, are scenes from a passenger jet on which a widow is repatriating the coffin holding her dead husband; like death-in- life or some malign masculine entropy, the corpse causes havoc as its coffin gets buffeted around the hold.

Amis has often had a problem structuring his fiction: books such as London Fields are overlong and fall apart at the end. Yellow Dog isn't too long, but its plot randomly lurches and heaves like a person suffering from seasickness. This would matter less if the satire weren't so feeble. Although the names of Henry Fielding and Jonathan Swift are bandied about hopefully in the text, the comedy generated at the expense of the monarchy and tabloid press feels forced and colourless. Clint Smoker ranks very low down Amis's gallery of fictional grotesques, while the flat scenes involving King Hal and his private secretary, Bugger, seem half-hearted.

Even Amis's banker, his extraordinary use of language, occasionally deserts him. The "fundamentally egregious cataract of tactical nuclear strike" (a thunderclap), "the way her flesh pushed out at him like the contours of a coin" (a description of a face): these are moments of overwriting, though in fairness they stand out because so much else is vividly crafted. Xan walking in a gale, for instance: "Xan was too old for fashion, for cuts and styles; but his trousers, now, were alternately flared and drainpiped by the wind."

It's a very flawed book, but there are some notable points of interest: signs that Amis is a good enough writer to fascinate even when he's off-form. Themes and characters from earlier works resurface: a heavy called Big Mal first turned up in a short story in the collection Heavy Water, while an episode when Xan visits the Californian porn industry is based on a magazine article Amis wrote. But the most interesting pre-echo is in Experience, when he describes his yearning for a daughter: "...I wanted to raise a girl. I was desperate to see how the other half lived." When Fernanda, his first daughter by his second wife, was born her heart briefly stopped beating, "and from then on all thoughts were primitive and choric".

The word "choric" recurs in Yellow Dog, initially on the opening page when it describes the injured Xan's howls of pain. Although the book is mainly about maleness, as so much of Amis's writing is, it's also about daughters: a new departure. The focus, disturbingly, is on their sexuality. The king is graphically awakened to it by a film still of his 15-year-old daughter lying naked in a bath. More disturbing yet, Xan entertains incestuous thoughts about his girls, as his wish to protect them from danger morphs into an urge to possess them: "I can't protect them. They're mine, and I can't protect them. So why not rend them? Why not rape them?"

These are dark thoughts indeed, and one admires (though doesn't relish) Amis's bravery in delving into them. The suggestion is that it requires an effort of will and act of love to be a good father and husband. When Russia asks the post-injury, Mr Hyde-like Xan to remember himself and stop being so libidinous and aggressive, the problem is that that's exactly what he is doing: remembering himself. Maleness unvarnished, according to Amis, is an aberrant condition ruled by primitive drives towards sex and violence. At its most gripping, Yellow Dog reads like a weird dream or rites of passage myth, in which Xan has to resist a craving to murder father figures, be faithless to his wife and sleep with his children.

In the past Amis has been criticised for his portrayal of women, who in earlier novels are usually cartoonish sex objects. Since his look at marriage in The Information, he has tried to incorporate such criticisms into his writing. His 1998 novella Night Train was narrated by a gruff-voiced woman called Mike, who is a sort of symbolic halfway house between male and female ("I am a police" is her studiedly genderless opening line). In Experience, he reflects with horror on Fred West, the mass murderer who killed Amis's cousin Lucy Partington. In Yellow Dog, Clint Smoker is a (not very good) parody of misogynist Amisian anti-heroes such as the monstrous John Self, narrator of Money.

Having once written with amoral seductiveness about badly behaved men, Amis now inquires into the source of men's bad behaviour: male human nature and the extent to which it determines their actions. The preoccupation ties in with his belief in a book's inherent, objective worth, "the thing behind" literary activity. It's a question of trying to uncover essential truths in a secular universe, the bigger thing behind everyday life, and it marks an important development in the ideas behind Amis's writing. The next step is for him to parlay them into a good novel - unlike Yellow Dog.