As the media interest in Martin Amis reached critical mass last year, innocent bystanders could be forgiven for losing sight of the novel at its core. TV and broadsheets talked up the author leaving his wife for a glamorous American paramour. Wrote exhaustively about a king's ransom exhausted on his teeth (more medical, less cosmetic). And they blazed long into the night on a rumoured £500,000 secured by his new super-agent, these critics who scarcely an eyelid bat when some lunatic shifts ill-earned millions round to Jeffy Archer's gaff. "Male turkey cocking," spat the blimpish-ego of A.S. Byatt.

But the book, you cry, what of the book?

Whether The Information is worth a half million anything is a matter for Amis and his paymasters, whatever you might think. More, perhaps it is for us to question how much the great unpublished should care for a book whose primary concern is urban literary jealousy. Is this writing what you know? Is Amis aiming or aimed? Richard Tull or Gwyn Barry? Or (and here's the rub) both?

Barry is the popular novelist of Amelior and Amelior Regained, two insipid but irrationally hot utopian trex. The great unwashed are mad for them between hardcovers and soft; a studio is talking movie deal. Poor old Richard, our whimpering anti-hero, has trouble enough getting his brain-scorching text typeset, let alone see it fly out bookshops like (pleasing thought ahead) Irvine Welsh on fire. Gwyn is raking it in and married to the impossibly rich Lady Demi. Chez Tull, a wife, brace of kids and mounds of biographies: "He was very good at reviewing books. When he reviewed a book, it stayed reviewed."

Arrogance? Self-hatred? Richard might be Gwyn's oldest chum, play regular tennis, snooker, chess, but his antagonism toward the Ameliorite knows no bounds. He's taken on to profile his rival on a tour of the States with Regained, even as Richard's grudgingly published epic Untitled is (literally) hospitalising potential readers.

That's your plot, and 494 pages of elegant, distinctly - pleasingly - misanthropic broodery doesn't stand up so well minus car smashes and blazing pistols without at least a modicum of talent. Amis writes superbly. Occasionally a little too superbly. Occasionally he's so busy writing a little too superbly his eyes slip from the prize and the information slips into a creative cul de sac of purple prose. His use of repetition is adroit, his jokes are good jokes. All the cosmology stuff, mind, is just so much excess baggage.

Some examples: "the pawns responded greedily to gravity"; "pornography was surveillance on the act of love"; "a Canaveral of decoders and unscramblers". So long as you remember that clever-writing can be over-writing. And verbosity can often times fill up just one too many pages: The Information has at least a hundred one-too-many-pages. Its interest perked, Radio 4 serialised this magnum opus in 15 bite-sized gobbets at the end of last year. That's not enough to oil-up all the gears that mash and grind in between these striking new neon-blue covers, but it shows where Amis might have gone. Too much, they say, of a good thing, not enough of the farcical American passages. Like Untitled, it can be a sod to read, but also a sodding good read when its author shuts up and gets on with it. And besides, whatever upsets the porcine Antonia Byatt surely merits an hour of anyone's time.