The Information, by Martin Amis (Flamingo, £6.99 in UK)

Failed writer Richard Tull has a problem well, several. Aside from losing his hair, he is unable to make love to his wife, and he can no longer write his unreadable novels. Trapped in book review land, he is forced to pen shorter and shorter reviews of longer and longer biographies of obscured writers. Meanwhile, his stupid friend Gwyn Barry has become fantastically and unforgivably famous for his allegedly daft Utopian romances. Tull, of course, wants to kill him. It is the slimmest of revenge plots, with a cluttered stage of domestic squalor and angst, peopled by Amis stereotypes passing for characters, but The Information is hilariously, vivaciously funny, and deftly demolishes the world of publishing. Amis is a gifted, of the moment satirist with extraordinary linguistic energy. All seeing, all knowing, he is in familiar territory here with his resident London baddies, all cloned from Keith in "Dead Babies (1975). Like many comic writers, Amis prefers vice to virtue, so the chances of profundity entering his work, or of it being taken seriously should it enter, are slim Language rules here, and while Amis may have already thematically painted himself pinto a corner with the no table exception of Other People (1978) and Time's Arrow (1993) no English writer can compete with his sheer stylistic verve and apocalyptically clever use of language. Funny enough to choke on.