For the purposes of this Booker Club, Tuesday's announcement of the shortlist couldn't have gone better. I'm personally disappointed that my favourite read so far – John Berger's From A To X – didn't make the final cut, but in terms of the logistics of this attempt to read through the entire longlist, it's excellent news.

There are plenty of books making the final cut that I haven't yet read (Sea of Poppies, The Clothes on Their Backs, The Northern Clemency, A Fraction of the Whole). Just as interesting are the two controversial exclusions: Salman Rushdie's Enchantress of Florence and the previous favourite Joseph O'Neill's Netherland. I'm also looking forward to uncovering the conspiracy theories in A Case Of Exploding Mangoes and finding out why so many people have been so annoyed by Tom Rob Smith's Child 44.

With slightly contrived irony that leaves only Michelle De Kretser's The Lost Dog unaccounted for. But this strange volume is one I'm most keen to muse over. Mainly because I hated it so much. Having gone through the misery of reading the thing I'm determined to get some payback, while the almost physical aversion I took to the book provides a salutary reminder of the subjectivity of these literary considerations.

That my dislike of The Lost Dog is a question of shade rather than definite colour was brought home to me when I realised that my main reasons for objecting to the book are very similar to the ones I had for recently praising John Berger. In From A To X a woman conjures up the world anew in an attempt come to terms with the personal cataclysm brought about by the loss of her lover to prison. This reassessment of the stuff of life allows Berger to create countless shining moments of epiphany. In De Kretser's book, the loss of a dog sparks a crisis in the life of the protagonist, Tom, who also consequently starts looking at his world with new focus. This time the author can only effect a dreadful constipated straining for profundity. Tom doesn't go shopping, he strolls "along packed aisles" marvelling "at the ease with which articles changed status, transmuted by the alchemy of desire." In a garden he encounters box hedges that contain "the kind of roses whose icy perfection was impervious to common rain." When he sees "sodden fields", they have a look – bizarrely – of "a bitch who has whelped too often".

There are more annoyances. First: an overuse of colons. Coupled with incredibly short sentences. Full of portent. But signifying what? Nothing.

Sometimes: the problem is compounded in painfully short paragraphs.

Sometimes: another crime. Certain words are clumsily – painfully – repeated and twisted all up into oddly ungrammatical sentences.

And what are we to make of attempted aphorisms like this: "Although beautiful, Yelena was kind"?

Reading pleasure is also considerably diminished by simple failures of storytelling. There's nothing particularly unusual about Kretser's use of the titular lost dog as a Macguffin and hanging a large number of story strands from it, but there is something unusually annoying about the way she has tangled them all up. A failure of pace causes constant stalls in the narrative. Whenever a storyline starts to stutter into life Kretser jumps into another, as if she is constantly interrupting herself. Interesting plot developments are no sooner hinted at than we are whisked away into dull digressions on art; the tedious history of Tom's early Indian upbringing; monotonous description's of his lover Nelly's studio; a pointless aside about September 11. Competing elements trip over each other and try to outdo each other in griminess and absurdity - one alone taking in cross-dressing, paedophilia, thwarted lesbian desire, suicide, drunken simpletons and strange things seen by moonlight. Meanwhile, lost in all this mess, the poor dog is still wandering the Australian outback.

The shame of all that is that the forgotten hunt for the titular canine is actually reasonably tense. It's also touching in its denouement. When De Kretser sticks to basic description and the simple evocation of pity, her writing can be effective and direct. The conclusion was effective, while an only slightly clumsily handled revelation that Tom has been wrong in his assessment of many of the relationships within the book is intriguing. It's just a shame that it's so painful reaching this point. I'm happy to agree with the judges' exclusion of this one from the shortlist – although slightly baffled as to why it ever made the long one.

Next time: The Sea Of Poppies by Amitav Ghosh.