In this, his first novel since he won the Man Booker Prize two years ago, Howard Jacobson seethes with glorious indignation.

Savagely, winningly, unflinchingly comic, he has struck a private seam of English satire, twinned as it is with satyric lusts and Jewish angst of the sort that afflicts those who have little connection with their religious roots, yet have a Jewish cast of mind, like it or not.

Jacobson's latest narrator is a man few writers will be able to resist. Guy Ableman is a literary novelist in his early 40s who knows his trade is on its last legs. Over lunch one day his agent bemoans the number of brilliant novels he receives each week, but which have no chance whatsoever of being published: "None was suitable for a three-for-two. None featured a vampire. None was about the Tudors. None could be marketed as a follow-up to The Girl Who Ate Her Own Placenta." Later that day he commits suicide, and while Guy knows he is not to blame, he is haunted by such lonely despair, which almost matches his own.

Fortunately, he has little time for navel-gazing. Not only is he desperate to find a subject for a novel that a publisher might accept, but he is married to a fiery wife, Vanessa, who bitterly resents his books since she cannot make a start on her own. Their home life in upmarket London is far from relaxed since Guy is not only in love with her, but with Vanessa's similarly fiery and beautiful mother, Poppy, who often stays with them. It is a symptom of the desperate times he finds himself in that Guy wonders if he should find out if his mother-in-law reciprocates his feelings.

As foolish as he is selfish, he is only slightly daunted by the idea that his wife might find out: "if she left me I'd have been heartbroken, but at least heartbreak is a subject. It's not abuse, but it's still a subject." Working on the same principle, he is aghast when he suspects Vanessa might have been having an affair with a writer he knows well. "It's a rule of the profession that novelists do not sleep with one another's wives or husbands. The reason being that you don't give a rival novelist the material for a book."

What ensues is a fiercely intelligent, fizzing piece of theatre, in which these three characters ricochet across the chapters like summer lightening, accompanied by stormy emotional weather and more than a few soakings in tears. Fears and hopes of adultery season the story, like a latterday Restoration comedy, in which it is not the infidelity that matters so much as its cause.

Riven by jealousies, Zoo Time is an intellectually rich depiction of the animal desires that drive us, and the human feelings that elevate and sadden us. It is also a deeply felt rant against modern society in which, to Guy's alarm, old standards are fading. "It was so hard to be a black-hearted libidinous old devil any more. So hard to be scurrilous with grace. So hard to be a man, fullstop." If the slide into propriety and PC correctitude goes much further, soon only his name will distinguish him from the gals.

In Guy Ableman, Jacobson has created an unforgettable narrator, a character defined by heroic flaws and tender, susceptible heart. He is also "a man in whose head words cavorted like the Ballets Russes", and for much of this substantial novel he proves excellent company. At times, however, he is decidedly trying, and at others so unhinged the reader almost has to look away, unable to watch the chaos he's about to unleash.

If there is a failing, it is that Jacobson's ire and wit are unleashed on a super- abundance of themes. Love, lust and literature are the backbone, but in pursuit of these ideas he adds a backdrop of childhood issues, and the indelible impact on Guy and his wealthy bisexual brother of an upbringing with a flinty, flirty mother who, with their insipid father, ran a high-class dress shop in the Midlands. Today, Guy is viewed as the feckless son he was considered as a boy: "I was the dreamer of the family. I read books, which meant I couldn't be trusted." And even now, the sibling rivalry that began young, still simmers.

There's a lot to digest besides this. But then Jacobson shares with Guy and many other of his heroes a pyrotechnic mind that never alights long on one subject before darting to the next, and just as swiftly returning. The effect is of a pinball machine – mesmerising and occasionally wearying. Yet even as one yearns for a moment's respite or a paragraph's worth of banality, one is also intensely grateful to be in the presence of such ferment, such resistance to the ordinary or the platitudinous or the pious.

Magnificently eclectic in its range of targets, Zoo Time is a bestiary of betes noir. Few modern novelists better balance the absurd with the artistic, the priapic with the philosophical, the wicked with the wise. A story of love, and a lament for life as well as literature, it is a scorching indictment of an anti-intellectual age in which most readers are greedy for pap, and those who want more than a sugared bun passed to them through the bars are doomed to starve.