He's been called the Mick Jagger of literature, but at 54 Martin Amis is showing no signs of the creative burnout so obviously afflicting Mick and the Stones. With the publication of his new novel Yellow Dog, Amis has reclaimed his spot as British literature's preeminent bad boy. The novel came out in the United Kingdom in August, prompting a barrage of press -- much of it viciously negative. No stranger to bad publicity, Amis told Playboy the response "has set a new low in English so-called 'literary journalism.'"

His 10th novel, Yellow Dog is at times hilariously funny, at times philosophical and searching. In it, Amis focuses his trademark black humor on the sordid side of life he so loves to explore.

The book opens with a savage beating and unfolds into a Tarantino-esque melee of vicious mobsters, coked-up catty ex-wives, potency pill-popping porn stars, smarmy journalists and despoiled innocents. The main character is Xan Meo, a famous actor who takes two blows to the head in a pub garden. The injury transforms him from an ideal husband into a leering lech who demands sex constantly from his wife and takes an unsettling interest in his own four-year-old daughter.

The intensity of Xan's beating parallels the lambasting Amis himself received in the British media over the book. The son of Kingsley Amis, the late British satirist, Amis has been a whipping boy in the British media almost since the 1973 publication of his debut novel The Rachel Papers, a hysterical look at teenage sex. Amis's divorce, his split with a longtime agent and even his dental work have earned him unflattering, often vitriolic ink. So it was par for the course when British novelist Tibor Fischer, assigned to review Yellow Dog, likened reading the book to catching a favorite uncle masturbating in front of children. Or that the British press gleefully celebrated Yellow Dog's recent failure to win the Booker Prize, the UK's highest literary award.

American audiences have usually been much kinder to Amis, but this time Yankee critics are lining up on both sides of the fence. The New York Times's Michiko Kakutani fired the first shot with her shrill observation that Yellow Dog "bears as much resemblance to Mr. Amis's best fiction as a bad karaoke singer does to Frank Sinatra." Publishers Weekly and Booklist volleyed back with much more favorable reviews. As he prepared for a reading tour of the United States, Amis shared his thoughts with Playboy on the furor surrounding his book in England, the power of pornography and the cultural significance of exposed navels.

Playboy: What have the last few months in Britain been like for you?

Martin Amis: Well, you'd like to say you've ridden above it without a scar. You can't but feel beaten up, although there were good reviews, too. It's like having the flu, basically. It fades, and you're all right.

Playboy: What explains the response to the book?

Amis: I seem to have stepped into a culture war. There is the personal stuff, which I'm bored with. There's an element in the British press that thinks I'm my father as well as me. That I was born in 1922 and that I'm now 81, although, in fact, I'm 54. There's a feeling that I have outstayed my welcome, which I think is irrational. But there's the culture war side, too, which is more interesting. Egalitarianism, individualism, populism, that is the ideology in England where we're all equal and the reader wants an even exchange with the author. He doesn't want to feel there's a gulf or an elevation between the two. And my stuff to them feels like a drone of elitist self-congratulation.

Playboy: What is it about your style that irritates them?

Amis: I like to say that it reminds certain people how thick they are, and how numb and smug. Actually, that's what I love when I read. I want to feel thick and smug and numb. I want a transfusion from above. The whole idea of "above" is verboten in England. I'm not sure what the American convulsion at the moment is, but I get the impression that people have moved beyond political correctness there by now. But here it lingers, although much ridiculed. It's there subliminally. I think the whole idea of aesthetic pleasure is in retreat in England. Is this true in America? I think it is. Look what's happened to poetry in the last two generations. It's no longer part of our lives the way it was.

Playboy: The big thing in America is reality TV, where there's no need to think anything up, because reality is supposedly more entertaining than what a writer can do.

Amis: Right. It's the celebration of mediocrity or even non-entity. The things that have to do with the elite and hierarchy are dealt with very uneasily here. Also, [in England] we have what you don't have, which is a sharply philistine-tending press. America has always had more time for its writers, because everyone grasps on some level that writers would play a big part in determining what America was, this New World. But here, England has never needed to be told what it was, it's so entrenched. There's a kind of giggly, scurrilous culture in the press here that there isn't in America.

Playboy: Why are you better received by American audiences than by British?

Amis: Paradoxically, I've always felt that they get me in America in a way they don't here. It's counterintuitive, in that England is known as the home of irony and wit. And Americans, although raucous and humorous, are not meant to be great connoisseurs of irony. But I've always felt they cut to the chase when they read me in America, whereas here, I drive them crazy. Also, my father Kingsley is such an English type and a representative part of the culture in a way he isn't in America.