Martin Amis excites hero-worship and resentment in equal measure. From male writers, this is often a symptom of wanting to be him. This new collection of journalism covers a range of subjects that include snooker, fiction and Martin Amis. Being female, I should, in Amis' view, be "less baffled and repelled" in making critical judgments. Here we go, then.

It wasn't his fault that he was born into the literati, and Visiting Mrs Nabokov abounds in literary gossip. When Burgess and Borges met, they chatted in Anglo-Saxon! Excuse me: what a pair of nellies. Here's Amis on Saul Bellow at a conference in Haifa: "He was in stalwart attendance … on the day I gave my paper …" Or Amis on his friendship with Salman Rushdie: "I often tell him that if the Rushdie Affair were, for instance, the Amis Affair …" How about Martin reporting from the set of Robocop II? "Here's cold proof of how hip and classy this outfit is: nearly everyone had read my stuff." Or scolding Polanski for miscasting Tess? "Polanski shrugged and disagreed, showing no more than mild disappointment."

Most writers have egos the size of Mount Sinai. Amis' ego and ambition have also been his tragedy. Paperback editions of his early work were plastered in the kind of covers that wouldn't have disgraced Jacqueline Susann's oeuvre, with prose inside to match. He was in that league, then.

The Moronic Inferno was less a comment on the US, perhaps, than a way of describing its author's inflamed consciousness. Still, in that earlier book, Amis surveyed Brian De Palma, Aids and Hugh Hefner, when finer British writers wouldn't touch them. He had fame, money, pussy galore. He was loved—yes, but not revered. Like the Krays, like Keith Talent in London Fields, he wanted respect. But not in Aretha Franklin's sense.

In 1984, Money—a trash classic—was passed over in that year's Booker Prize, along with Angela Carter's Nights at the Circus. Headmaster's end-of-term report: no refinement, no intellectual rigour. Frightfully smutty mind. Must try harder. Time's Arrow followed, eventually. Here was the big subject: the Holocaust! Here was the pointless technical virtuosity: writing it backwards. Amis was correct in his estimate of the Booker panel's solemn idiocy. Time's Arrow was duly shortlisted, but didn't win.

Still, wasn't Martin Amis—old rugged chops, literature's bit of rough—really one of us? In Visiting Mrs Nabokov, we see him as a rosy-cheeked youth attending Battersea Grammar School: "practically Broadmoor". He was saved from this ordeal only by being swept off to the West Indies for four months' film work. "How can they afford the five-star prices?" he cries now, surveying holidaymakers in St Lucia. "Are they all betting-shops nabobs or coin-op kings?" He is startled, on meeting the winner of the darts world championship, that the man isn't "half-drunk in some roadhouse, smothered in tattoos". He is astonished, in China, to discover a Watford player "on his way from the ballet to the opera".

In a more gallant mood, here's Martin Amis, girl-watcher, on "Tennis: the women's game": "Dynasty with balls, bright yellow fuzzy ones …" Or on topless sunbathing in Cannes: "I had never seen so many breasts in my life, and all nonchalantly bared to the breeze." His piece on Madonna is a soft lament for the time when sexual trickery was something men did to women—one-way traffic, apparently.

A young Amis prepares for a Stones concert by ordering up two girls, and sullenly equipping himself with earplugs. Add a mention of a "dusky bongoist" accompanying Charlie Watts, and you have the spit of whichever John Junor type fulminated against noisy yobbos way back in the sixties.

"I can read and write, and to a high standard," he insists. And Visiting Mrs Nabokov has its share of cute phrases and observations. Trouble is, you have to wade through an awful lot of dated stuff, before you get to them. None of these articles is as good as his recent defence of Philip Larkin in the Guardian. Yet what was that about? More nostalgia for uglier times, when callow white men could be as sexist, racist or snobbish as they wished. The only response would be a wry chuckle over the brightness of the offence, and—with any luck—literary groupies would sink to their knees in breathless admiration. Outsiders were excluded, in the terms of this testimony, by having the wrong dinner jacket or liking naff songs.

In Visiting Mrs Nabokov, Amis and his chums drive themselves to hysteria, being clever-clever for its own sake. They form shifty poker schools, then "go home and sob in our wives' arms". Dear friends of Martin and "my father" are ceaselessly interviewed, but the only one he makes you want to read is V S Pritchett. Martin's head is still in the 1950s, and Amisland is a literary fantasy. Anyone who wants it is welcome to it. He seems less a hip, classy Mr Vain, and more like Hardy's Little Father Time.

I used to find Amis an entertaining writer. I found this collection pretty miserable. In the final straits, I had to buck myself up with active humour (Denis Leary's No Cure for Cancer), live fiction (Shena Mackay's The Laughing Academy), real literary criticism (D J Taylor's After the War) and a brilliant mind in top gear: Robert Hughes' Culture of Complaint. I'm thrilled they're repeating Absolutely Fabulous. I long for the TV Buddha of Suburbia. Contemporary culture isn't ugly; it's rich and beautiful. And none of it has anything to do with Martin Amis.