The Love Secrets of Don Juan, by Tim Lott

Tim Lott's journalism is always enjoyable because it is both provocative and sincere. However much you might disagree, you have to respect his openness. The voice he has invented to narrate this novel, however, inflicts sincerity like bruises on the reader's ears.

Women's liberation in the Seventies encouraged women writers to break taboos, tell unpalatable, sexy, angry "truths". Sometimes this kind of writing was damned as confessional: too autobiographical; too raw. But now, interestingly, a new generation of men is exploring a similar project. As masculinity has been made problematic, so many male writers, gleefully or crossly, are leaping into that unexplored continent: the modern male psyche.

It's an exciting invitation, and a confusing one. Are men and women so different? The socialist strand of feminism argued that they were similar in important ways; comrades under the skin. Sexual difference could go hand in hand with androgyny and empathy. (Even Flaubert, no socialist, could assert: Madame Bovary, c'est moi.) This progress towards friendship having been made, with many hiccoughs of misunderstanding, it's always a pity to see male narratives backtrack and repeat old tropes about Woman as the eternal Other.

Tim Lott's hero Danny, telling his sorry, woman-blaming tale of love lost and abused, seems never to have heard of a man-friendly feminism. The tradition of male complaints about women goes back a long way. From the Roman de la Rose, male writers in the mood have castigated women for fickleness, narcissism, moral and mental weakness, scheming, betrayal and lying. The despised strategies of the powerless, kinder writers said. Let other pens dwell on guilt and misery, Jane Austen declared. Tim Lott takes up her challenge with a splendidly convincing, though depressing, display of spleen, glumness, grumpiness and self-pity.

Danny, known as Spike, is struggling to cope with divorce from Beth, who has kept custody of their six-year-old daughter Poppy. Beth is a monster of bitchiness and cruelty, who enjoys screwing Danny for all the money and possessions she can, so that he is reduced to a sordid bedsit while she swans about in the marital home, socialising with all her single-mother friends. Beth humiliates Danny in public, enjoys seeing him reduced to writing copy for shiny lavatory paper, tries to alienate him from Poppy, flaunts her new lover.

Danny, floundering, searches desperately for survival techniques. On the advice of his inept-sounding therapist he uses his copywriting skills to track his failures with women, making lists of nightmare things about women that every sensible man should know, analysing his memories of lovers, trying to stay alert to the danger-signals when he starts dating women again and meets one he might love.

This is all potentially touching and interesting. Who would not want to feel compassionate about the agony and loss of divorce? The problem resides in the first-person narrative. A novel should express things in a way inexpressible in any other form. And yes, a good novel reinvents the form. But Danny's monologue is so close to the free-associative ramblings of psychotherapy, to the ironic ideologies of ad campaigns, to the psychobabble of self-help books, to the polemic of journalism, that it ends up sounding simply like a postmodern pastiche.

The novel as an art form, deploying subtle devices even when most apparently vernacular, gets lost. We become trapped inside Danny's ego, a prison of self-hate and self-doubt. Elizabeth Bennet accused Mr Darcy of a propensity to hate everybody. Danny is another Darcy: not so much misogynist as misanthrope. He's rotten to his man friend as well. He can't enjoy anything. His mother didn't love him enough. His father was distant; an inadequate role model, we surmise. I thought what was wrong with him was obvious: he hates women because he depends on them, yet is supposed to be a patriarch.

Thank God: at the end, things improve. I stopped wanting to top myself and screamed for joy. Perhaps now he would get out into the sunshine and learn to have a sensual, good time.

Michèle Roberts's 'The Mistressclass' is published next month by Little, Brown