In a recent article in Britain's Daily Telegraph titled Someone Needs to Have a Word With Amis, the British novelist Tibor Fischer described furtively reading an advance copy of Martin Amis's new novel, Yellow Dog, on the underground and worrying that strangers would assume incorrectly that he was enjoying himself. He wasn't.

Yellow Dog isn't bad as in not very good or slightly disappointing," Fischer wrote. "It's not-knowing-where-to-look bad." Shimmering with fury at what he portrayed as betrayal by a literary hero he once idolised to the point of memorising passages from his work, Fischer added that being seen reading the book would be "like your favourite uncle being caught in a school playground, masturbating".

In the sleepy days of August, Fischer's evocative fit of bad temper dropped into the pool of literary London like a stone, reverberating on the pages of other newspapers, in the e-mail messages of rival authors and even in the deliberations of the judges for the Booker Prize, Britain's top literary award. Though it might seem odd to declaim in August about a novel that is not scheduled for publication until this week, nothing is odd, really, when it comes to Amis and the strangely potent brew of envy, unease, schadenfreude and fury he inevitably provokes in fellow writers in Britian.

Before the publication in 1995 of his last novel, The Information, the furore had to do with personal things: the size of his advance (at ё500,000 - $1.2 million - it was big before its time); the breakdown of his first marriage; his decision to leave his longtime agent (and the wife of his then-close friend, the novelist Julian Barnes), Pat Kavanagh, for the tough American agent Andrew Wylie; even his seemingly un-English foray into dental surgery. Now the debate has to do with whether Amis has somehow lost his touch.

Yellow Dog, a satire that takes on, among other things, the pornography industry, British royalty and the tabloid press, is either an embarrassment or a masterpiece, depending on which critics you listen to; whether they have rivalrous relationships with Amis; and whether they admire his pungent, lacerating prose.

Unfortunately for Fischer's case, his own new novel, Voyage to the End of the Room, is due to be published the same day as Amis's, raising questions about his motives.

Robert Douglas-Fairhurst, a fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford, who gave Yellow Dog a glowing review in last Sunday's Observer, said that given Amis's fictional and other musings on the subject of envy, perhaps Fischer meant his remarks to be a part of an elaborate literary in-joke, like that in Vladimir Nabokov's novel Pale Fire.

In the hall-of-mirrors narrative of Pale Fire, an increasingly insane editor comments in increasingly eccentric terms about the posthumous poem of a recently deceased fictional American poet. (In this scenario, Fischer would be playing the part of the insane editor.)

"You read this and say, 'Is this someone who's read Pale Fire and is adding themselves, as a shared joke, in Amis' ongoing interest in envy?'" Douglas-Fairhurst said. "Or is it that he hasn't read Pale Fire - or not closely enough - and is unaware that he's suffering from the same sort of envy that Amis has been able to dissect and examine so brilliantly?"

In any case, the knives had come out. A few days after Fischer's article appeared, The Sunday Times, quoting several anonymous Booker Prize judges who were snippily dismissive of Yellow Dog, stated with some satisfaction that the Amis book would not be nominated for the prize. That was soon proved wrong when Yellow Dog duly appeared on the 23-book-long list (which will be winnowed into a list of finalists before a winner is chosen) along with a resounding endorsement from John Carey, the chairman of the judges.

The book is not without flaws, Carey said in an interview, but is still "a great comic extravagance" comparable to the works of Jonathan Swift.

"People take, and did take, exception to Swift's depiction of the human race in the same way," he said. "It's enormously crude and ugly, but it's meant to be, because it's satirising crudeness and ugliness."

But other negative accounts were filtering out, as was a serious debate about whether Amis's celebrity had cowed his editors at Jonathan Cape, his publisher, into failing to edit him sufficiently. "The way British publishing works, you go from not being published no matter how good you are to being published no matter how bad you are," Fischer wrote.

Erica Wagner, literary editor of The Times, said in an interview that perhaps Fischer had a point and that Yellow Dog would have benefited from a more vigorous editing to tame some of its more effusive Amisian digressions. She said the book was not one of Amis's best.

"I wonder more and more about the editing process, and I feel that more and more writers are published rather than edited," Wagner said.

Amis has been a literary celebrity since, just out of university, he unveiled his singular voice and deeply cynical worldview in The Rachel Papers, a hilarious account of a very clever and rather hapless young man's efforts to get women to sleep with him. Since then he has written more than a dozen works of fiction and non-fiction, including literary criticism; short stories; novels; a memoir, Experience; and a book about Stalin, Koba the Dread: Laughter and the Twenty Million.

But something about him has always set him apart, even from the other literary celebrities of his generation - Ian McEwen, Julian Barnes and Salman Rushdie. It has to do with his father, Kingsley Amis, of course, and also with his hard-smoking, hard-drinking, rock-star persona, which has always proved deeply attractive yet deeply vexing to the sort of male writers who tend to interview him for magazines and newspapers.

Jonathan Burnham, the president and editor-in-chief of Miramax Books, which is publishing Yellow Dog in the US, said that Amis seemed to provoke idolatry and envy in equal doses.

"One thing that drives everyone crazy is that Martin doesn't really care about the storm he creates around him," Burnham said. "He doesn't consciously seek to generate all this heat, and it just adds to all this madness."

Carey, the Booker judge, said that Amis, in addition to being brilliant, was also extremely resilient. "If you're as clever as that, and as successful, you don't much care about what someone like Tibor Fischer says."

- New York Times

Yellow Dog is published tomorrow by Jonathan Cape at $45.