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Will Self revised edition (incorporating Deborah Orr RIP)

Started by gilbertharding, October 21, 2019, 12:44:50 PM

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Sin Agog

What's the novel with the eidetiker (photographic memory)?  I remember reading that in my teens, getting to the part where The Fat Controller gives the teen boy the perfect homebrewed acne remedy, namely washing one's face with their own sperm, and actually trying it out. Had no effect.  Maybe I washed it off too soon?

gilbertharding


Egyptian Feast


Blue Jam

Quote from: Sebastian Cobb on October 21, 2019, 06:41:16 PM
He is the anti-Vonnegut.

Care to expand on this? Asking as someone whose favourite author is Vonnegut and who could never get very far into any of Self's books. Is it because Vonnegut was economical with language while Self's writing was more flowery?

Sebastian Cobb

Quote from: Blue Jam on October 24, 2019, 05:53:04 PM
Is it because Vonnegut was economical with language while Self's writing was more flowery?

Yes, Vonnegut was able to explain complicated things simply, Self tended to use complex language to convey relatively simple ideas.

Would've loved a Vonnegut version of Great Apes though.

Twit 2

His brother's middle name is 'Otter'. Fuck's that about?


Cursus

Perhaps unsurprisingly, both the Times and Sunday Times reviews are extremely negative:

The Times - Will by Will Self: a memoir from a sneering junkie

QuoteAs the grandson of Sir Henry Self, permanent secretary to the Ministry of Aviation, and the son of Professor Peter Self, an expert in town planning at the London School of Economics, the future novelist Will Self spent his younger years spurning his comfortable upper-middle-class credentials and thinking it very clever and original to try and be a soul damned in the flames of hell.

"My dear boy, must you be so wild and impulsive?" Self's father asks him after Self steals the family car and wraps it around a lamppost. It is a question the reader asks throughout this indulgent, adolescent memoir, which is composed in a flotsam-and-jetsam stream-of-consciousness style, derived from William Burroughs.

Self can't wait to shed his "drug virginity" and finds life so deeply boring and anaesthetised that he perks up only when self-harming with a cigarette lighter, his burnt forearm "smelling of bacon fat". At Oxford, in the late Seventies and early Eighties, Self was a thorough waster, seldom attending lectures or tutorials and covering his exam papers with cartoons. (They still generously awarded him a third — or, as he calls it here, "a miserable f***ing Third".) He was conscientious, however, in his consumption of uppers, downers, twisters and screamers: Diconal, Ritalin, Mogadon. He snorted so much stuff that his sinuses became infected, "like a metal vice, ever tightening behind his face".

Note how throughout Will the author always refers to himself as "Will" or "he" or "his" — as if he is a separate character, from whom he is now detached. (Christopher Isherwood always distanced himself like that, but it is a strategy of vanity rather than the reverse; it is preening.) The technique certainly allows Self, who is 58, to describe the practicalities of narcotics as if with a brisk, objective, clinical determination. Will, he says, once enterprisingly poured liquid morphine and kaolin into a pan, which he baked in the oven. "The gloop turned into a weird dun substance" that was then crumbled into a pipe and smoked.

Whether a woozy or a heightened state is induced, the effect is always of a nauseating illness — "eyes squeaking in their sockets, all fleshy surfaces hooking into each other . . . He boils in the bag of his own corrupted skin," and so on and on. Self loves overegging the delirious, Jacobean quasi-medical details, telling us about the open sores on his thighs and buttocks. His lips and tongue are "numbed to non-existence".

There's almost a paradoxically monkish delight in telling us about the ascetic flats he lived in, where there was no money or patience for anything but the true essentials — at most a naked lightbulb swaying above green linoleum. Here he'd stand in saggy underpants, taking drugs and waiting to take more drugs. "The drugs go into the system. The system metabolises them out again." Self realises he is "a sick junkie, petrified by withdrawal, and sunk deep in silent, solipsistic agony" — so why did he want nothing more than to fall apart?

Perhaps we can blame the Sixties, when Self grew up watching the wholesome Blue Peter, with frisky Shep and faithful Petra, yet its set, an "unbounded space" in a whitish "void" was weirdly unsettling; or else there was "that goggle-eyed loon" Jimmy Savile introducing "spaniel-coiffed singers" on Top of the Pops — the disco set this time "a multicoloured void". The Magic Roundabout, narrated by Emma Thompson's father, Eric, starring "swishy Dougal and dozy Dylan" was nothing if not psychedelic.

Such programmes made Self hate the very idea of "the straight world", the "barren expanse" of domesticity. He sneers at his mother, an editor at Duckworth, for wandering about the house "in her pale blue Terylene dressing gown" and for her inability to cook anything other than "dull pasta dishes". He hates his father for "his wide and ruddy face", for his "hippo mouth, with its isolate, greenish teeth" and for driving a "diarrhoea-coloured Austin Maxi" (it's also "puke-yellow"). He hates polite cocktail parties — smiling guests, canapés, cubes of cheese — "Nothing surpasses the nausea of cheesiness."

He hates people who do dire jobs in telemarketing, sell computer equipment, or who call themselves data-processing managers. He hates general builders in Stoke Newington. He is a snob, too, is Will. He hates anyone who calls their grandmother "Nan" because it brands them as déclassé. He hates people who possess and display book-club editions, wear off-the-peg suits, and who live in Stockport, Solihull or Southampton; the provinces are beyond the pale.

It is the drugs that have given him ecstatic revelations: "This infinitesimal whitehead is the tip of a massive iceberg of pus," he says of one detail or another. If heroin, and the rest, show Self the "gutters running black with liquid misery", then this is no more than a glimpse of a universal truth. Listen to Will, in Will, and he is the less deceived messiah, rather glorying in a dystopian London that is "a soggy morass", crammed with broken-down lorries and "f***ed-up old caravans on bricks", where the buildings are made from "perished and scabby mortar", carpets are covered with "broken glass and popcorn", and the zombie-citizens chew "soggy roast potatoes and leathery lamb".

I confess I have never fully understood the Will Self phenomenon. For years I'd assumed he was a Martin Amis satirical creation — isn't John Self a character in Money? The dandy posing is off-putting, ridiculous, although no worse than the terrible Anthony Burgess fretwork prose: "the arabesques unspooling from the Marlboro's tip" (smoking); "he rubs himself back into quiescence" (masturbation); "his bebop heart began to play arrhythmic drum fills and hit rim-shots on his resonating ribcage" (no idea).

Apart from a good joke about Canberra ("it is an Aboriginal word meaning 'Milton Keynes' "), there is little to admire in this book, which is perhaps the intention. It knocks itself out to be infernal and it is impossible to feel any sympathy for privileged Will, as he sneers at the world, continually shoots up and snorts in lavatories, wheedles and whines. He is always in funds, travels to India, Australia, Portugal and Sri Lanka whenever he fancies. He never acknowledges what an agonising worry he would have been to his family, whether or not they lived in Edwardian Hove or stinking bourgeois Hampstead.

It all seems very pathetic — yet no doubt Self wants Will to be an act of expiation, as Stephen Hero was for Joyce. The way is open for a further volume, where he'll grow up and a literary career gathers momentum. The present book ends in a drying-out clinic in Weston-super-Mare, where out hero discovers he has genital warts.

Sunday Times - Will by Will Self: a tragic case of Self love

QuoteWill Self is trapped in a compulsive pattern of behaviour that doesn't look much fun from the outside. Every year or two, the saturnine writer, television personality and composer of boutique cookie fortunes for the Chinese restaurant Hakkasan will produce a new novel. Then, in order to publicise the novel, he will write an essay about how the novel is dead. "I've seen it happen in my writing lifetime," he complains.

The notion that he might have reached this conclusion based on a sample size of one has not escaped those closest to him. His youngest son, Luther, recently announced to Twitter: "He's an idiot... he's an author who hasn't sold any of his last two books so he assumes that the whole medium is dying." And perhaps that finally hit home because at 58, Self has decided it's time to kill the memoir instead.

Will (he refers to himself in the third-person) presents us with five episodes from his youth and young manhood, from the late 1970s to the mid-1980s, when he was in the grip of a heroin addiction.

It is, to be fair, not without promise as material. There's the Ballardian setting of Hampstead Garden Suburb, which Self experiences as "a dithyramb of the dull"; there are Burroughsian jaunts to India and Australia; there's a car crash; there's even a cameo from Margaret Thatcher.

There's also Will's divorced parents: his American mother is a frustrated writer who grows marijuana plants as a way of connecting with her son; his father is a Pooterish academic who proves to be "insufferably tolerant". "Oh, Will, your mother and I feel you really oughtn't to be selling cocaine," he says.

There is also tragedy. At Oxford University, Self became close friends with Edward St Aubyn, who would go on to document his own childhood trauma and substance abuse in the Patrick Melrose novels. Another pal, referred to as Hugh, died young. The image of Self snorting heroin on John Major's plane while covering the 1997 election for the Observer has long formed the bedrock of his media persona — the dark, derisive, vaguely dangerous Establishment jester (jesters always being insiders in the first place).

Self may have fallen far from his late-1990s heyday — his late former wife, the journalist Deborah Orr, cursed his name to the last. But a memoir could have provided a chance for self-reflection. Perhaps a reminder of a once-distinctive literary identity; or at any rate, a more exalted use for his verbal agility than stuffing glib apothegms inside macaroons for Mayfair bankers?

Sadly, it is impossible to imagine anyone who has not been paid to do so reading this ferociously boring book to the end — let alone enjoying it as anything other than word bingo (entelechy... ephebe... empurpled... ersatz... entropy... engraft.)

Self's prose has ossified. The same words (haver, captious, oubliette), the overuse of italics (for "ejaculatory thoughts") and verbal tics keep showing up "again and annagain" and "annaround annaround". And there's little variation in the subject matter. His teenage achievements include (I gently paraphrase) masturbating into socks, squeezing spots and vomiting "so copiously on a friend's mother's sofa that it had to be thrown away". The perpetual misuse of "Little Willy's" phallus occasions surprisingly little drama, even as it yields sentences such as: "Well, you riddle... and you fiddle... rub-a-dub dubbing his rubbery little nubbin of a penis." But it's defecation that emerges as his real hobby. Just when you think you have read everything about Self's "bowels liquefying", he sets off for India and — well, you can see where this is going. More sloppy narcissism, more dreary digressions and yet more importuning of his shit upon the reader.

At university, Self falls in with a fast set led by Caius, a thinly disguised, petty caricature of St Aubyn, described as a "pretentious prat" in velvet-collared Crombie and Church's loafers. Will shows a sort of homoerotic fealty but ends up consumed with resentment. In a monstrous, unforgivable passage, he sneeringly appropriates St Aubyn's experience of rape by his father, whining that it just isn't fair, the way his posh friend "got everything": money, women and an experience that "self-annihilatory or not, would undoubtedly make good copy..." St Aubyn Sr, the paedophile, is described almost affectionately.

There's a crabby conservatism in Self's outlook. He's desperate to be accepted by the Establishment, terrified about doing anything that might be considered middle-class. Beneath all the scabrous rants is an old-fashioned, Princess Margaret-esque snootiness about people who say "toilet". He rails against "the British-f****** bourgeoisie" — but what he's usually railing against is their decor choices.

About his parents he is pathetically cruel and condescending (his elder brother Jonathan, who wrote his own gloomy memoir, is virtually ignored). Each seems a model of forbearance. Both secure him jobs. His father continues to hug and kiss him. His mother pays for rehab in Weston-super-Mare. She also has better instincts than her son, as Self inadvertently reveals: "Will remembers her stock response to almost any of his f***-ups of misadventures: that'll make good copy... Which would be followed closely by: Remember, any piece of writing must answer the following questions: Who? What? Where? Why? And when?"

If only he had listened. Wherever he travels in the world, all his locations feel the same; it's never clear what exactly is happening, and he spends more time describing faecal matter than other humans. As for the "why" — why is he like this? — the only clue he offers is something he mysteriously calls the "voids". Some are white, some are black, some are grey. Self seems to be saying they're responsible for his addiction, but that's all I can tell you about them. There's always a sense that he finds the job of communicating a bit beneath him — and as a writer, that's a pretty fatal flaw.

Bennett Brauer

That first review reads like Roger Lewis's style, especially with the obligatory mention of Anthony Burgess.

SavageHedgehog

He doesn't like Friends much. I think. Kind of hard to tell amongst all the tangents.

Funcrusher

If I fancy a change of username I might go for 'Anthony Burgess fretwork prose'.


gilbertharding

Will Self trending on twitter right now for an article he wrote for the New European (!) slagging off Adrian Chiles... he's gone too far this time.

bgmnts

Quite a funny article, if a tad too long.

Don't see 'cunt' in an article very often, so that was a nice surprise.