I choose this book with some misgivings. After finishing it, I emailed a friend whose work had  I had better be vague about this  overlapped with Lewis's at one point. What, I asked, did he think of Lewis? The reply was immediate and unambiguous: a string of upper-case invective of which the most complimentary, and indeed repeatable, word was "twisted".

He has a point. Lewis first came to most people's attention some years ago with a biography of Peter Sellers which, though enormous, seemed to spend quite a lot of time chronicling the life of Lewis. Then seven years ago came his biography of Anthony Burgess. The most complimentary word for it that reviewers came up with was "eccentric"; "loathsome" and "facetious" figured, too. Lewis had come to the conclusion that Burgess was a talentless hack whose works are not worth reading. This was published, rather queasily one imagines, by Faber; and yet one marvels at Lewis's surprise in Seasonal Suicide Notes that they do not invite him to their summer party.

One gets the idea: Lewis is not in this business to make friends. And this is, at times, a pretty unpleasant book. I don't think it's very funny to say, of someone with a long face, that he looks like Hitler did when he got his gas bill; nor do I think his remarks about Pat Kavanagh and Julian Barnes cover him with glory. This is, basically, a contrarian, black-hearted, outsider's The Smoking Diaries: gobbets of spleen coughed out in a constant, enraged stream. He has, as he puts it himself, a forest fire inside his head, and he does not care who gets scorched by the blaze.

"Harold Pinter obit. What a ghastly clanking beast he was, with eyeballs blacker than anthracite . . . I always found it suspect the way Pinter would write about oppression in faraway lands and under distant regimes, and yet he'd take it out on waiters and taxi drivers in London." (Has Lewis put Pinter in here as a conscious echo of, and rebuke to, The Smoking Diaries? On the few occasions I saw Pinter's dealings with staff of various kinds, he was genially polite. But maybe Lewis knows better.)

However, I recommend this book because it is enormously entertaining, and because Lewis is doing it right. His belief that a biographer is writing as much about himself as he is about his subject may have been taken to unprofitable and unwise extremes; but now that he is writing about himself the self-obsession is legitimate. Whether this translates as self-awareness, though, is moot. For someone who claims to be a pariah, a complete outsider, he spends a lot of time with Gyles Brandreth, Craig Brown and Paul Bailey; he makes much of his proximity to Maureen Lipman during a South American cruise. And what about Lewis calling Anthony Burgess his "hero"?

But someone who thrashes about like this so much is going to hit a deserving target every so often. He is at his best when he rails against the idiocy of the age, the pusillanimity of publishers who are happy to see centuries of culture disappear beneath a heap of tributes to Jade Goody or biographies of Simon Cowell, whose Desert Island Discs luxury, Lewis pertinently reminds us, is a mirror. One of his children screws up his exams (this book is meant to be a collection of antidotes to the good-news round robins so mocked by our own Simon Hoggart), which makes him despair; he then becomes a juggler in Zippos Circus, which makes him, very winningly, fizz with pride. He drinks a bottle of wine a day. (Why so little?) He can say, of Philip Hensher, that "he's everywhere. Like shit in a field" and still get Hensher to make this one of his books of the year. This book, says Lewis, "is a Francis Bacon scream on behalf of every pudding-faced person who has been generally disrespected, passed over at work, who is in thrall to his own feckless, ungrateful children, who is starved of affection, short of money and recognition . . ." The list goes on, and you will note the "his" in there  the only woman I know who read it chucked it across the room  but you won't be bored.