Publishers Weekly
★ 06/24/2024
Self (Umbrella) draws on journals kept by his mother in the 1950s for a shattering portrait of a woman trapped by her domestic responsibilities and lingering “postpartum neurosis.” Elaine Hancock describes her life in Ithaca, N.Y., with a “terrifying boundlessness of her own contempt.” She’s married to John Hancock, a pompous junior faculty member at Cornell, and is constantly at war with herself, battling “migraines and menses” and overwhelmed with loathing for her husband (“The front room is all his head.... His rear end squidges against the back wall of the kitchen... there’s... no room for me!”). Elaine is mortified by her thoughts of harming their child, Billy, and feels excluded from the love he and John share, leaving her in search of someone to satisfy her sexual urges. When she falls for one of John’s colleagues, her view of the affair mirrors her feeling about herself: “The whole thing is likely to explode at any moment.” She’s also a writer, but worries her work is no good. When she meets Vladimir Nabokov at a faculty party, he advises her with heartbreaking precision to “paint the bars of my own cage.” Still, she views her writing as “nonviable... as some obstetrician might say of an embryo.” Self pulls off a painfully authentic depiction of Elaine’s interior life, doing justice to her fierce anger and sexual desire along with her fears and humiliations. This is a tour de force. (Sept.)
From the Publisher
Praise for Elaine:
“A shattering portrait of a woman trapped by her domestic responsibilities and lingering ‘postpartum neurosis’ . . . Self pulls off a painfully authentic depiction of Elaine’s interior life, doing justice to her fierce anger and sexual desire along with her fears and humiliations. This is a tour de force.”—Publishers Weekly (starred review)
Praise for Will Self:
“Will Self may not be the last modernist at work but at the moment he’s the most fascinating of the tradition’s torch bearers.”—New York
“Self is the most daring and delightful novelist of his generation, a writer whose formidable intellect is mercilessly targeted on the limits of the cerebral as a means of understanding. Yes, he makes you think, but he also insists that you feel.”—Guardian
“Mr. Self often enough writes with such vividness it’s as if he is the first person to see anything at all.”—New York Times
“Self writes in a high-modernist, hallucinatory, stream-of-consciousness style, leaping between sentences, time periods, and perspectives . . . The reward is a strange, vivid book.”—New Yorker
“Self’s prose demands real attention, but is never less than sharp, biting and incisive. Prepare to be eaten whole.”—Independent
“Like the work of the great high modernists from the 1920s, like Joyce, Woolf and Eliot, there is a kind of chaotic beauty in Self’s unrestricted writing . . . You’ll be simultaneously entertained, mesmerized, intellectually stimulated, baffled—and laugh your ass off.”—NPR
“Will Self’s Phone will be one of the most significant literary works of our century . . . Over and above the intellectual sprezzatura of the work, there is, at its heart, an emotional core, a profound sense of grief.”—New Statesman
“Self has indeed been a goat among the sheep of contemporary English fiction, a puckish trickster self-consciously at odds with its middle-class politeness . . . Writers, too, as Self so wonderfully proves, can awaken the half-dead and reanimate that which has been sunk in oblivion.”—New York Review of Books
