Elaine by Will Self review: 'a building simmer of a novel'

Charting the frustrations of the wife of an Ivy League academic in 1950s America, Will Self’s new novel is based on the diaries his mother kept for over 40 years. Review by Stuart Kelly

Will Self | AFP via Getty Images

Thinking about Will Self’s oeuvre to date, it is increasingly clear that a defining concern has been the competing claims of psychotherapy and the novel for the control of narrative: the talking cure in a creative agon with the writing catharsis, getting it all out versus getting it all down. It is fundamental to the triptych of Umbrella, Shark and Phone – a series which I firmly believe will be seen as one of the most significant cultural productions of this generation – but is equally discernible in The Book Of Dave, in the Land of Children’s Jokes in My Idea Of Fun, in the rewriting of Dorian: An Imitation, in the found documents and metatexual hallucinations of the stories in Grey Area.

Elaine, the reader is informed, is “a story based on the intimate diaries of [Self’s] mother, discovered after her death”. But unlike his previous book Will, a set of novelised scenes from his autobiography, this is definitely a novel. It is not a roman-à-clef, however much the reader wishes Billy to be Will, but a work of art in its own right.

Although Self’s work has often been praised for its pyrotechnics and psychedelia, its virtuoso trills and gleeful savagery, Elaine is an altogether quieter, sadder affair. The phrase that came to mind was “all passion spent” – curiously from Milton’s Samson Agonistes, in that the father here, John, is an academic specialising in Milton. That drama also has the line “to live a life half dead, a living death” which might be an epigraph for Elaine’s claustrophobic, constricted existence.

The novel opens in upstate New York in November 1955 but is catapulted back a year after a chapter; we then trace how the beginning came about. This evident artifice shows artistry at work - the question becomes why things happen rather than merely what. But from the outset there is a sense of dislocation: “Standing in the roadway outside 1100 Hemlock Street, Elaine thinks to herself: I’m standing in the road outside my home… But is this... it?”

Readers familiar with Self’s most recent works will recognise the distinctive style in the use of ellipses and the deployment of italics, although these features can result in different effects. The tension is that although we believe this is Elaine’s mind talking to herself, she talks typographically. We can hear the bemusements and double-takes and ironies only because we see them.

Elaine prides herself on pre-planned off-the-cuff remarks (“Can it be wrong, she wonders, to set such store by one’s own wit?”), but behind this is a graphomania. She obsessively writes and destroys diaries, as well as scribbling lists of fictitious children (“Letitia Hancock, Lettice Hancock, Lalage Hancock, Lucy Hancock, Lisa Hancock …and those’re just the els!”). Elaine toys with being a writer – there is a vague idea of something about the composer Telemann. But the character she creates is herself, even when, as in therapy, she finds herself unconvincing. Never less than piercingly self-critical, Elaine has made an observation “that’s remained revolving around her – a buzzing insistence that one is only a collection of mutinous selves, the coherence of which – if any – is made possible by skin alone”, the epiphany being “we’re wearing coveralls … made of ourselves”.

The novel’s momentum is a year-long static, a building simmer. John and Elaine’s social life is structured around faculty parties – “twelve full months of drunken fumbles and liquorish kisses”, although she disdains the “childish soubriquet” of “necking parties”. Another couple, Ted and Betty Troppmann, are drawn closer and closer into their orbit.

The novel describes itself best – I can see why the publishers chose this as the grab-quote as it is better than any précis I might offer: “screaming bebop jazz and modernistically distorted lives, cramped by bomb-terror, stretched by sex-hunger, and in the midst of it all Elaine”. It builds to a horrific crescendo that in its ingenious goading into hurting and verbal violence is reminiscent of Edward Albee more than John Updike. If there is a moral it comes from a line in a film the two couples see together, The Earrings of Madame de…, by Max Ophüls – “unhappiness is our own invention”. This certainly seems to be Elaine’s most creative output, particularly when it comes to dissatisfactions about her own body. Although she sees herself plaintively as “a goddamn poster girl for the Modern American Woman: posed in her kitchen, skirts stiff as crinolines, smile plasticized, a penis in one hand … a spatula in the other”, there is an unbearable tenderness is the scenes at the end with Billy, made utterly Selfesque by the tenderness and intimacy being conveyed through the word “shit”.

There is a scene that would have been intrusive or pretentious in any other writer, when Elaine meets Vera and Vladimir Nabokov at one of the ghastly soirées. It is an embarrassing and touching moment, as Vladimir talks about an ape in the zoo who, given charcoal, drew the bars of his cage (of course, a hint of Simon Dykes from Great Apes). Self has been drawing the bars of the cage in iridescent and crepuscular ways throughout his career. Here, he makes you weep at the confines.

Elaine, by Will Self, Atlantic, £18.99