Howard Jacobson started writing his new novel, a bitter satire on the demise of literary culture in the 21st century, before his previous one, The Finkler Question, received the 2010 Man Booker prize. You'd think such conspicuous success might have softened his attitude to the reading public, or at least given him pause  it's surely a bit awkward for an author whose work has been mentioned on the 10 O'Clock News to rage about a culture "which held that a novel didn't have to be well-written to be a masterpiece, indeed was more likely to be a masterpiece for being ill-written"  but it seems that his years of perceived neglect can't be forgotten so easily. Zoo Time is a 400-page tantrum directed at reading groups, Amazon reviews, three-for-two offers, Kindle, Richard and Judy, graphic novels, vampire novels, Scandinavian crime novels, declining advances, declining standards of grammar, declining interest in language and psychology, and much else besides.
Guy Ableman, the novel's hero, is (like his creator) a middle-aged Jewish author of sex comedies from the north of England. He's involved in an extravagant midlife crisis, largely caused by his dwindling sales, and largely manifested in a frantic desire to sleep with his mother-in-law. To begin with, it's all good, dirty fun. There are some decent jokes and a couple of well-made set pieces. Jacobson has a thundering oratorical voice and a mad priapic energy that at times recalls the Philip Roth of Sabbath's Theater. But pretty soon his hobbyhorse outrides his interest in storytelling, and the narrative becomes cluttered with explicit statements on the plight of serious writers in the marketplace: "Novels are history"; "No one had readers"; "Fiction was fucked".
Since Zoo Time deals with character, setting and plot in an entirely cursory way, you can only really engage with it as a piece of pure rhetoric  and yet its complaints are either unfocused or plain unconvincing. At its heart is nostalgia for "the idea of the book as a prestigious object, source of wisdom, and impious disturbance". But the idea that a book might be both "impious" and "prestigious" is relatively new, and has only ever held sway within a narrow stratum of society.
It's unclear quite when the golden age of reading that Ableman pines for is meant to have occurred, but judging from his frequent allusions to Joseph Conrad, Henry James, James Joyce and Henry Miller, he'd situate it at least partially during the modernist period. Those were certainly great years for literature, but were they really so different in terms of literature's reception? Conrad's Nostromo and James's The Golden Bowl were both published in 1904, and it's true that they found contemporary readers, but Marie Corelli published two schlock bestsellers the same year, and these were incomparably more popular. Joyce's Ulysses and Miller's Tropic of Cancer, meanwhile, far from securing for their authors the kind of universal esteem denied to Jacobson and his contemporaries, were banned for several years after they were written. So much for the good old days.
The same goes for Ableman's horror of recent technological innovations such as ebooks and Twitter. In the past hundred years, the advent of mass-market paperbacks, radio, film and television have all been viewed as dooming the novel. For as long as literary culture has existed, there have been warnings of its imminent demise. It's a deeply reactionary attitude.
Another predictable source of outrage is the diminished revenue of the publishing industry. (Ableman's editor is pitied because "he couldn't any longer afford oysters".) It's true that advances are shrinking drastically at the moment; it's true that writers earn considerably less than pop stars or film directors, and that literary writers earn considerably less than thriller writers. Well, so what? I have nothing against authors earning lots of money  I wish they earned much more  but that isn't a cogent reason for saying that they should earn any more, and Zoo Time fails to provide a better one. Just because Howard Jacobson cares more about Henry James than EL James, he takes it as self-evidently depressing that most people don't feel the same. As a basis for satire, that's a non-starter.

In the days before The Finkler Question won the 2010 Man Booker prize, Howard Jacobson enthusiasts tended to cast him as an under-appreciated outsider. It wasn't quite true  he had been published by top literary imprints for nearly 30 years  but it was a nice rhetorical position, offering a neat explanation of their man's failure to hit the big time. The pale, bloodless guardians of the English novel, so the argument went, simply couldn't cope with his comedy, his rumbustiousness, his Jewishness, his pungent, balls-out assaults on good taste.

Now the game's up on all that. Jacobson has, as he puts it, been "discovered". His latest novel, Zoo Time, comes stripped of all outsider glamour, splattered with praise from the great and good, and accompanied by grandiose claims: he is arguably "the greatest novelist working in Britain today", and so on. You could make a plausible case that Kalooki Nights (2006)  probably his best novel, about a gassing in a Manchester suburb  is a neglected masterpiece (though I wouldn't want to make it myself). A few eyebrows were raised when The Finkler Question, dealing with antisemitism and philo-semitism among metropolitan types, won the Booker, but it just about supported the weight of Jacobson's newly acquired eminence. With Zoo Time, I suspect, he's due for a backlash. Jacobson has many talents  as a rhetorician, a mud-slinger, a purveyor of fine phrases and sprightly patter, as an indefatigable singer of the song of himself. But is he a great novelist, or even a good one?

Zoo Time conforms closely to the classic recipe for a Howard Jacobson novel. Take a childless, Jewish middle-aged man, born in Manchester or thereabouts, now living in London pursuing a profession not unlike the author's: in the past, we've had columnists, cartoonists and academics; this time, he's a novelist, Guy Ableman. Give him ungovernable romantic urges and a powerful but embattled sense of self-worth: Guy, whose first novel stars a zoo keeper and her lustful monkeys, describes himself as "a man ruled by pointless ambition and a blazing red penis". Throw in some marital difficulties and outré sexual enthusiasms: this one briefly covers the classic Jacobson kinks  shoe fetishism, oedipal fantasy, and the powerful desire to be cuckolded  but focuses chiefly on Guy's wish to bed his mother-in-law. Add some agitated discussion of Jewish identity. Then stir it all up with a lot of discourse, and of discourse about discourse. Ensure that the plot is minimal, and largely circular. And there it is, the distinctive feel of Jacobson's work  like being trapped in a confined space with a particularly garrulous pervert.

Jacobson is a highly self-conscious writer, and the reader's possible objections to all this feature heavily in this story. Guy's wife and friends complain that he only ever writes about himself; various women accuse him of misogyny, and say that they can't "identify" with his characters. As it goes along, Zoo Time argues with you about why you're not enjoying it. Yes, it has little plot, but "only a moron could be interested in plot". Garrulous perverts not to your taste? Well, remember that "devilish, existential blasphemers"  Henry Miller, DH Lawrence, Céline  wrote many of the greatest 20th-century novels. And if you worry that all this sounds a bit navel-gazing, Jacobson has got there first, and is making defensive jokes about it: "And this is when you know you're in deep shit as a writer  when the heroes of your novels are novelists worrying that the heroes of their novels are novelists who know they're in deep shit."

What is odd about Jacobson is the combination of existential blasphemy with a particular strain of broad English comedy. Again, he is well aware of this: when described as "the English Philip Roth", he likes to call himself "the Jewish Jane Austen". But that's wide of the mark. Kingsley Amis or even Tom Sharpe would be more accurate, coexisting uneasily with the intensity of Roth in his raging and obscene mode: Portnoy's Complaint and Sabbath's Theatre, in their different ways, cast very long shadows over his work. And though Jacobson rails against the mechanical mystery and whodunit plot, he's actually fairly straitjacketed by plot conventions himself. Comedy's requirement for silly symmetries and hilarious incidents is often the only force driving this book forward. Much of the comedy is effortful, failing to rise above this level of contrived mishearing:

He even reeled off a sentence from each of my first two novels.

"Those were your plays," he said.

I stared at him. "My plays? I've never written a play."

He laughed again, a basso profundo laugh from far in and deep down. Clearly he found me a riot. "Days. Those were the days."

The killer for Zoo Time is that Jacobson has a limited talent for invention, and certainly very little inclination for it. As with many authors possessed of a powerful voice, it tends to crowd out everything else in the novel: "A writer such as I am feels he's been away from the first person for too long if a third-person narrative goes on for more than two paragraphs " Guy's every passing thought is generously and sometimes brilliantly transcribed, but otherwise Jacobson seems to have no idea what to do with his stick people, who couple and uncouple, turn gay or Hasidic, to no discernible pattern.

Meanwhile, he rants and rages about the decline of the novel, about "Oxfam, Amazon, eBooks, iPads, Oprah, apps, Richard and Judy, Facebook  the graphic novel, Kindle, vampirism", about Swedish detective novels and misery memoirs, about the loss of "the idea of the book as prestigious object, source of wisdom, and impious disturbance". The satirical argument seems either obvious or obviously wrong. The idea of the novel as prestigious object, impious disturbance and so on, is alive and well. If it wasn't, why would anyone publish Zoo Time?