War of Desire and Technology at the Close of the Mechanical Age, aspires to be as impressive as her prior achievements. In it, Stone discusses the way that new technologies challenge traditional views of personal identity. She suggests that the existing Western model of the sovereign subject will be totally undermined by our increasing ability to adopt different personae in virtual communities and by rapid improvements in transgender and prosthetic surgery.

The introduction comes at you like shrapnel. For readers acquainted with the twin peaks of Wired journalism and US academia, this should present no problem. But a structure that adheres to the spirit of HyperText and Web sites makes it no easier to read. She stresses subtleties of tone, and is quick to add that her “central ideas remain more or less unstated – hovering in the background”. The subjects that do hover close enough to stop are various and of varying impact.

An overview of the development of virtual communities reappraises William Gibson’s Neuromancer before reporting on a trial in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, in which a man is accused of raping a woman by seducing one of her multiple personalities. Stone questions the link between multiple personality disorder and mental illness, indicating that this condition will typify everyday life in the multiple-user virtual communities on the Internet. The Oshkosh incident is then neatly contrasted with the story of the “cross-dressing psychiatrist”, Stanford Lewin.

In 1982, Lewin opened an account with CompuServe, using the name Julie Graham and giving her the persona of a mute, paraplegic victim of a car crash. “She” had been on the brink of suicide, but having gone online she blossomed and became the pearl of the quarter. For Lewin, camouflaging Julie’s nonexistence became a nightmare. He dreamed of ways he could kill her off and get back to his day job. But as Julie lay at death’s door, her online admirers deluged her address with electronic grapes. Lewin despaired – and backed down. “What do you do when your imaginary playmate makes friends better than you do?” Form a discussion group, presumably.

There is much to admire in subsequent stories, such as how an early bulletin board service in San Francisco in the 1970s broke down under the heavy traffic of abusive language e-mailed by adolescents. A recounting of the rise and fall of Pac-Man and the Atari Lab dovetails with a challenge to Wellspring Systems, whose game programmers are 100 per cent male. Why do computer games cater so badly for women? “People don’t want plot,” says Memphis Smith, producer of Battle Commander at Wellspring. “They just want to shoot things.” Stone keeps her cool and makes some wry observations on the game market and “the ludic dimension of human-computer interaction” wondering whether this sexism is something we have to learn to live with.

Stone fires off a number of ideas that relate to changing modes of representation, the personal and the collective, but having done so she frequently fails to follow them through. This and the structure of the book meant I found the whole thing frustrating. It is great to see somebody try to apply the idioms of avant-garde composition to the printed page, but overall the book is less of a performance and more of a puzzle whose parts, once reconstructed, leave a shape too slight to bear the burden of their implications.

If the focus remains blurred, don’t be put off: the whole fights tooth and nail with the sum of the parts. Nevertheless, aspiring cyber surfers may be better off reading Susan Sontag’s 1963 essay “The anthropologist as hero”. The frontier is not what it seems. All the time I’m reminded of a line from the new Tricky record, The Hell E. P.: “Are you someone else? Because I’m me.”

Word processing already makes text production seem as easy as 1, 2, 3 because writing, like everything else, has to move on apace or pull up – and admit it: the competition from television, video and games consoles is all too much. You can’t plug stereo speakers into the printed word … can you? Authors and artists who want to stay one step ahead of the next century’s digital cookery class have the odds stacked against them.

In more ways than one, that is. Visitors from a distant planet may need reminding of recent press coverage of Martin Amis’s new book, The Information. The rest of us have had to trawl through an ocean of erroneous articles. Most reporters must have misread the press release. They thought the book was called The Innuendo.

Any writer who chooses professional envy as a key theme of a novel runs the risk of calumny. Who gives a monkey’s in any case? He’s got more than a few bob to his name. Martin Amis Bob Bob Bob Bob Bob. The writer, filling in the spaces between manuscript delivery, publication and feedback: up and down like a tennis ball, waiting for the serve.

So what does The Information tell us? Many of us began by reading extracts published in The Observer. “First service”. Presented as a section of the novel, these columns were sampled from 400 pages, but no one was to know that – you couldn’t buy the complete item until the following week. Which nonetheless I did: the sad design of the dust jacket enjoying a brief fanfare at Waterstones before being deposed by the frillier EQ of High Fidelity.

Being reminded that I’d already read page one in the Life section wasn’t a big help. It’s all about misrepresentation. Had it been called the Midlife Crisis section, it would have made sense. Anyone trying to follow Amis the Writer, as opposed to Amis the Schadenfreude bandwagon has their work cut out.

Having read it cover to cover and now coming to review it, I decided that there had to be a few ground rules. Firstly, no quotations. Any attempt to siphon petrol from this particular tank would only pre-empt the reader and the journey in store. Second consideration: the infectious class that spins off Amis’s prose style. The triple dots, (brackets), the cut-off phrases, the italics. Amis uses language to usher words into cinematic sequences. This is a rare talent. Thirdly, how to deal with matters arising on page 242. Slight problem in connection with item one.

To rewind a moment. The book launches two writers, Richard Tull and Barry Gwyn, once friends, into binary opposition on their different wheels of fortune. One is a “difficult” experimental lush trapped in his own History of Increasing Humiliation, the other a wildly successful purveyor of the bland. Tull blasts his readers straight into the A&E ward, literally. Gwyn flies on autopilot through his mediocre “California”.

Tull hires wildboy Scozzy (as in SCSI?) to do one over on Gwyn. Tull battles on with his Untitled fight. The sharp turns and set pieces based around this embittered quest for personal justice and redemption switch between hilarious accuracy and cranial arrest. “I Laughed Out Loud”, they sometimes say on paperbacks. When this one comes out, perhaps the best appraisal would be “I Needed an Oxygen Mask”. The Information make the head swim. It’s hard to take it all in.

The book is not just about guys – the geezers, the blokes – who battle it out, either against all the odds or with the chips stacked in their favour. The backdrop points the reader towards an even more complex set of shapes than those cast by Men’s psyches … not meaning to be partial. (The female characters look to have the upper hand.) Intercontinental “Breach of the Peace” … fax machines, mobile phones, bodyguards, private planes, the cosmetic surgery of every city centre (not just the corner-shop cameras in Ladbroke Grove, W10) infuse this novel with the photographic breadth of Mass Observation. The observation being massive. As in brutal.

The Information is an odyssey into the alien self. The characters are hand-drawn portraits of desperate living, somewhere between the objective realism of a Dickens story, a Doreé engraving and the faster turnover on an airport novel. The language does justice to this gathering of opposites. It’s a delight: an interwoven balance of the literary and the lavatorial … the mutant made articulate. Amis’s ability to merge the argot of technology with the low-res experience of a man down on his luck speaks louder than a lottery ticket.

New ĐÓ°ÉÔ­´´ readers will be bemused to find the author relate his on-land observations of the greater scheme of the unknown megaverse, where the smog-stained clouds above Westway feed into the spatial crisis, to the stars, only to crash-land on the brain of some poor bastard. The weather here is God’s response to Prozac.

And so to page 242 (now take a card, take any card). Try looking for a witness, a figure such as Goethe (Amis reckons Coleridge), the last man who could claim to have read everything, the best one you could ask for, to give you the gen, to really fill you in, on all The Information. The author bids you this – the wealth of what is still at stake.

If every new book is less and less of the whole, every writer could end up publishing more and more of the same. Amis is acute to the build-up of the bitstream and the frequent traffic pile-ups in our own heads. The word in question, the title, the buzzword acts as a decoy. The Information is a brave and emotive attempt to take an honest inventory: it is not apart from its weaknesses. It is a challenge to the bastard brief that has us make nothing out of something and thinking you’re getting away with it. So here’s the raw nerve centre. The Information begins with the beguiled.