Dot in the Universe Lucy Ellmann Bloomsbury, 199pp, £12.99 ISBN 0747562547

Be warned, all those who disapprove of exclamation marks: Lucy Ellmann's latest novel is hopping with them. And how versatile they are! Occasionally, they imply wonderment and chirpy enthusiasm, but don't be fooled - although this satire is fearless and intelligent, it doesn't contain much that is life-affirming. Instead, they stand for a knowing nod or a sharply ironic elbow in the ribs, as they punctuate tales of porn, incest, purgatory and murder.

If the mere thought of so many exclamations makes you jittery, then you ought to know about the capital letters, too. From the very first paragraph, the words "GOD", "BIG", "US" and "LOOK" scream out at you. No page contains fewer than a half-dozen, and together they provide a hectoring bass line (or an abridged version, for the time-pressed reader).

Lucy Ellmann's three previous novels have left critics enraptured and enraged. Dot in the Universe may elicit a similarly divided response. It would be almost impossible to summarise the riot of opinions and ideas that make up the plot; it is enough to say that its staples are sex and death, and that it includes a tour of the afterlife and a peek inside a possum's pouch. Ellmann constructs epic lists of what makes her ANGRY, fuming about everything from the rights of marsupials to the utter pointlessness of science. She is especially angry, however, about the way in which middle-aged women, like her heroine Dot, are written off.

Midway through the first part of this darkly comic triptych, Dot hits 40 and becomes terrified of death. Deciding that the only way to cope with this is to control it, she commits suicide. She botches the attempt, but still finds herself carted off to the morgue. "People are ALWAYS DOING THIS," our narrator shrieks. "They are always declaring middle-aged women dead when they're NOT!"

Ladies of a certain age have been getting even in popular fiction for a while now - the title of Elizabeth Buchan's latest novel, Revenge of the Middle-Aged Woman, said it all - but Dot has little in common with this frowzy sisterhood of wives and mothers. For one thing, she has never let herself go. She may live in Jaywick Sands, a ghost town on the bleak east coast of England, but Dot is possessed of the perfect figure and face for her era: "tight-lipped, pointy-nosed, pink-skinned, blonde-haired". Indeed, life itself is just "PERFECT" right up until her 40th birthday, whereupon she begins maiming children, murdering old ladies and stealing their tea cosies.

Her perfect hubby's affair with a porn actress is the final straw. From this point Dot's adventures, and the novel, become increasingly bizarre. She enters a surreal underworld full of "personal horrors" from her past. It is populated by well-meaning adulterers, spider squishers and those who spent their days listening to too much Radio 4. When it comes, Dot's rebirth is not as a perfect size 10, but as a possum in Ohio, and then again as her own infant self.

Although Ellmann's targets are sometimes predictable, a nimble-minded anarchy governs the novel's structure, and in its discursive riffs on irritations, dislikes and hatreds, it spirals from the microscopic to the cosmic. In the end, however, these lists boil everything down to one muddy, nihilistic mass of ills. Likewise, Dot starts out as just one of the trillions of dots in the universe, not much different from gum on the pavement, poppy seeds or pimples at a distance, but by the close of the novel she has grown into the ultimate dot in the universe: a black hole, swallowing any glimmer of hope. Ellmann succeeds in depicting death as comic, but in so doing she makes a tragic farce of life, and having reincarnated Dot as herself, abandons her precisely where we found her at the novel's beginning.

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